Her last name is Reinking and she's a dancer, so naturally Megan Reinking gets the question a lot: Are you related to Ann? Answer: Maybe, distantly.
Megan had the chance to figure it out with Ann Reinking herself when she attended the Broadway Theatre Project, a summer training program co-founded by Ann, as a high schooler. Ann told her that, yes, she knew there were Reinkings in the Midwest—Megan's from Iowa—but her family had lost touch with those relatives several generations back, apparently after a controversial divorce.
A question Megan would rather be asked is: How does she feel to be part of the Hair Tribe in Central Park this summer? Short answer: Totally thrilled. Longer answer: "Hair has always been my favorite musical, since I was a kid. My first exposure to musicals was my mom's old records, and there were three that I was obsessed with: Hair, Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar." She used to dance and sing along to the Hair album all the time, even when she didn't "have any idea what I was talking about." Like the song "Colored Spade," in which Hud raps out a slew of racial epithets and stereotypes. "I thought it was a tap dance song, because there's a lyric about tap dancing," Megan recalls.
In high school she and her friends liked to sing "Black Boys/White Boys" in the basement. Today she has a solo in "Black Boys" in the park production. You'll also see her front and center during the "Ain't Got No" reprise, and she has a few affectionate moments with Jonathan Groff (Claude) during "I Got Life" and "Sodomy." And she partakes in some, ahem, free love in a couple of scenes.
Like most of the Hair cast, Reinking was in the concert staging presented for one weekend last September after the regular Shakespeare in the Park season. In January, when the Public Theater decided to give it a full production, everyone was offered the same roles (and told to stop cutting their hair). Megan had been trying to get into a production of Hair ever since she began doing musical theater. Whenever she'd heard about an open call for it anywhere, she went. She once got close to being cast as Sheila regionally, but the theater had already filled its allotted Equity slots. Bryce Ryness was also at those auditions, and he didn't get a part that time either. He's now playing Woof in the park, and he and Reinking smiled at each other with great satisfaction when they saw each other the first day of rehearsals.
Reinking's affinity for Hair stems not only from those old records but also from her avid interest in history. And the 1960s is one of the two periods in American history that intrigue her most (the Civil War is the other). Among her fave books that she's reread time and again are The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien and A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo, both about the Vietnam era. When Reinking first studied the Vietnam War in high school, she found out something she hadn't known before: Her father is a Vietnam vet. "He doesn't talk about it at all," she says, but he did agree to be interviewed by his daughter when she was researching the war for a term paper. She saved the transcript of the interview and has given a copy to everyone in the Hair cast.
To the self-described "history buff," Hair's second-act songs "Walking in Space" and "Three-Five-Zero-Zero" resonate most profoundly—and are her favorites in the show to perform. "They communicate so many truths about who these people were, and who we are today," she says. "It's the part of the show that speaks the most to me directly and says what these people were fighting against and spoke out about."
