HAIR (1979)

Colour, 1979, 121 m. / Directed by Milos Forman / Screenplay by Michael Weller / Music by Galt MacDermot, Lyrics by Gerome Ragni & James Rado / Starring Treat Williams, John Savage, Beverly D’Angelo, Annie Golden, Dorsey Wright, Don Dacus, Cheryl Barnes 

(United Artists)

originally published November 14, 2007

Hair (subtitled The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical) made its auspicious debut as the inaugural show for the opening of Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre in New York City in 1967. With additional retooling (including a substantial number of new songs), the show opened on Broadway in April of 1968, where it ran for 1,750 performances before finally closing on July 1, 1972. Among its original cast (the “Tribe”) were the show’s authors and co-lyricists Rado and Ragni, as well as future stars Melba Moore and Diane Keaton. 

1968 was a year dominated by very strong musicals, including Sherman Edwards’ 1776, Kander and Ebb’s Zorba, and the Burt Bacharach and Hal David's Promises, Promises, a musical version of Billy Wilder's The Apartment. Hair received only two Tony nominations, for Best Musical and Best Director (for Tom O’Horgan), and it lost both to 1776, although composer Galt MacDermot won a Drama Desk Award for his score.

Hair broke with tradition in ways beyond its musical and thematic elements, which included heavy influences of everything from folk music to country. The musical marked the first time elements of the contemporary counter-cultural movements were given a mainstream airing in a venue geared primarily at those adults who felt excluded from it, and proved eye-opening to many who became fervent supporters of the show. Hair toured extensively for years and had long-running companies in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities across the United States while still in its initial Broadway run. Successful mountings of the show soon followed in the United Kingdom (the London run of two years ended only because the roof of its theatre collapsed), Germany and Australia. A Mexican production was shut down after one performance by authorities because of on-stage nudity.

Famously, the musical generated significant controversy because of its first act “Love-In” closer, which saw most of the cast fully nude (participation was optional) as the curtain came down. The musical also included a fully integrated cast, and was peppered with liberal attitudes towards sex and drugs in a way even the most frank dramas had usually skirted.

An unfortunate side effect of the runaway success of Hair, due in good part to the many critics who labeled the show “fresh” and “innovative,” was a plethora of sub-standard “rock” musicals which would occasionally plague Broadway throughout the 1970s. This movement was encouraged further by the success of Jesus Christ Superstar, and no one seemed to realize that both Galt MacDermot and Andrew Lloyd Webber were both highly trained professional composers, not rock musicians. One actual rock opera written during the period, The Who's Tommy, wouldn't make it to Broadway until the 1990s, and then in a substantially compromised form.

The genre ultimately reached its nadir at the hands of 1976’s Rockabye Hamlet, the very title of which renders any discussion thereof completely superfluous.

Of course, the creators of Hair were inevitably expected to make lightning strike twice.  MacDermot fared well with his first follow-up, teaming with John Guare as lyricist for the successful re-interpretation of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona(1971). Any good will earned there was wiped out with the sci-fi disaster Via Galactica (1972) (with Christopher Gore as lyricist), which made the unintentionally hilarious move of replacing much of the stage floor with trampolines to “simulate” zero gravity, leaving its actors flailing around haplessly while trying to act out a storyline so convoluted and redolent with symbolism there’s no point in even attempting to relate it here. According to theatre historian Ken Mandelbaum, the show was originally to be entitled Up!, but the title was changed when it was realized that the marquee of the Uris theatre where it was playing would read “Up! Uris.”  Via Galactica ran for 7 performances.

MacDermot re-teamed with Hair’s Ragni for his next effort, the interesting if equally-doomed Dude (also 1972), which managed to run for 16 performances, and whose major contribution to theatre history seems to be that its destruction of the stage area of the Broadway Theatre for its “environmental” staging, clumping the audience haphazardly about a number of smaller stages, made way for Harold Prince’s acclaimed low-brow revival of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. MacDermot’s sole score for the theatre after Dude was his short-lived but brilliant adaptation (with librettist William Dumaresq) of Saroyan’s The Human Comedy(1984), a true American opera that will hopefully someday see a much-needed revival. 

The story of Hair was loosely centered on the members of “The Tribe”:  Claude, the leader of the group, Berger, Claude’s best friend, and their mutual love interest, Sheila, a political activist and NYU film student. Other complications arose with the Jeanie, in love with Claude but pregnant by another man, Woof, an admitted bisexual, and Hud, a member of the Black Panthers. In the end, Claude fails to burn his draft card, and is drafted and goes off to fight in Vietnam, where he is killed. But the plot was nearly an afterthought, as much of the evening of Hair was musical, with songs overlapping and most often spilling into one another without pause. Indeed, as multiple productions opened they included many revisions, and the Broadway production itself was never “locked” (the point at which a show undergoes no further revisions). To avoid any confusion, and leaving out the many songs which were later inserted into the show, I have listed only the songs which were included in Hair for its Broadway premiere.

Song Listing

Aquarius

Donna

Hashish

Sodomy

Colored Spade

Manchester

Ain't Got No

I Believe In Love

Air

Initials

I Got Life

Going Down

Hair

My Conviction*

Easy To Be Hard

Don't Put It Down

Frank Mills

Be-In

Where Do I Go

Electric Blues

Black Boys

White Boys

Walking in Space

Abie Baby*

Three-Five-Zero-Zero

What A Piece Of Work Is Man

Good Morning Starshine

The Bed

The Flesh Failures (Let The Sun Shine In)

BLUE indicates Broadway songs removed for the film version; RED indicates songs altered considerably from their original form; GREEN indicates songs added specifically for the film version.

*These songs were recorded for the film, and are extant on the soundtrack recording.  There is every indication that these numbers were also filmed, but have never been seen or issued as deleted scenes on any release of the film.

Michael Weller’s screenplay for the film keeps the character names, but otherwise substantially rewrites the entire plot of Hair, with the musical numbers rearranged as required (although it still opens with “Aquarius” and closes with “The Flesh Failures (Let The Sun Shine In)”).  For the film, Claude (Savage) is an Oklahoma farm boy who travels to New York for a last day of freedom before enlisting in the Army.  In the Park he meets Berger (Williams) and the other members of the Tribe (although they are never referred to as such in the film):  Woof (Dacus, of the band Chicago), Jeanie (Golden) and Hud (Wright).  Claude sees wealthy debutante Sheila (D’Angelo) riding in Central Park, and becomes infatuated with her, and Berger makes it his goal to unite the couple before Claude’s fated date with the Army.  After a disastrous attempt at crashing Sheila’s debut results in the gang being thrown in jail, everyone ends up reconnecting at a love-in in the Park.  Claude and Sheila fumble their initial attempts at getting together, but Sheila nonetheless agrees to go with Berger and the gang to visit Claude during his army training in Arizona.  Further complications arise with the sudden appearance of Hud’s estranged wife (Barnes) and child.  

Rather than introducing the weight of the Vietnam conflict in the musical’s closing moments, the film plays its hand openly, with storm clouds visible in its opening scenes of Claude’s awkward farewell to his father – unlike the Claude of the stage play (really more akin to how Berger is presented in the film), this Claude is not only constantly aware that he is going to war, he seems determined to do so.  

Hair firmly establishes its unique tone with its opening number, “Aquarius,” especially in its approach to incorporating dance and movement into the story.  Modern dance pioneer Twyla Tharp was brought in, along with her dance troupe, to stage the film’s choreography, which introduced a fluid and organic feel to the numbers (with the exception of the Army sequences) quite unlike the precise and controlled movements most audiences would associate with dance.  Here Forman also introduces a pattern he will repeat throughout the film at key moments – the singer (Ren Woods) passionately extolling the song, with cutaways to Tharp’s dancers.  The singer and the dancers are never seen in the same shot, and it is implied they are in two completely separate environments.  Forman returns to this filmic juxtaposition for several of the songs, using the music to link two separate locations and/or time periods.  In “White Boys / Black Boys,” this is used to comic effect, as he cuts back and forth between the girls singing the song (including Nell Carter and Charlayne Woodard from Broadway’s then-running Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Broadway stalwart Laurie Beechman) and the U.S. Army draft board officers as they examine incoming recruits.  For the title number, the song is simultaneously performed by Berger as he walks the streets of New York and the gang in prison for crashing Sheila’s party.  This lends the musical moments an unexpected dynamic quality, and it is not accidental that this tying together of separate elements plays powerfully into the film’s final scene.

Helping the film immensely in keeping its buoyant energy flowing is its talented core cast.  Treat Williams is thoroughly engaging as Berger, and his puppy-dog playfulness makes his character’s persistent concern with Claude’s happiness so natural that it makes it impossible to imagine anyone else in the role.  Savage keeps his character completely likeable in the difficult role of Claude, as he’s forced, with very little dialogue, to convey a wide range of conflicts, including his infatuation with Sheila and his determination to join the Army.  The movie is all the richer for the presence of D’Angelo; though she gets only one semi-solo (the infectious “Good Morning Starshine”), it’s always a joy watching her onscreen.  Golden (who’s since gone on to Broadway, most notably in Sondheim’s darkly comic Assassins), Wright and Dacus all make strong contributions, effectively conveying the natural camaraderie of this group of misfits, and Barnes is heart-breaking in her solo delivery of “Easy To Be Hard.”

For audiences in 1979, Hair seemed a somewhat dubious choice of projects for director Milos Forman.  It was his follow-up to the universally acclaimed adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, which had not only earned Forman an Academy Award for best director, but had also swept the Best Picture, Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Laurence Hauben and Bo Goldman) Oscars as well (a feat managed only by 1934’s It Happened One Night and 1992’s Silence of the Lambs).  Even critics who admired Hair were puzzled at Forman’s motives for bringing the “hippie musical” to the screen, which most had come to regard as hopelessly dated in the stretch of time between its 1968 premiere on Broadway and the movie screens of 1979, which, with the exception of the previous year’s Grease, were proving more and more resistant to musicals.

The general air of befuddlement which surrounded Hair upon its release seems odd in retrospect, especially the refusal of the film’s contemporaries to place Hair into its proper political context.  Hair re-emerged at the time when American filmmakers and audiences were finally willing to come to terms with the fallout of the failed Vietnam conflict.  While movies likeThe Deer Hunter and Coming Home (both 1978) were taking a sober look at the effects of the conflict on those who fought and those who stayed behind, Hair examined Vietnam’s damaging effects on the nation’s youth and culture.

Although Hair is very funny and irreverent and full of moments of real musical exuberance, it is most certainly not the happy “flower people” movie that many first-time viewers expect; what makes the film truly resonate is its unflinching view of the consequences of living the so-called “hippie” life.  Berger chooses to live on the streets with his friends, but he does have a home and parents who are ready and willing to wash his dirty jeans and make him a sandwich “with lots of mayonnaise” when he stops by to ask for money.  Hud is enjoying hanging out and pondering his possible fatherhood of Jeanie’s baby, but he is horrified when his wife and young son manage to track him down and address him as “Lafayette,” his abandoned identity.  All of these pointed moments reinforce the feeling that the weight of the world is hovering just over the characters’ shoulders.  The film’s final scenes underline the sober point – that a war will inevitably affect more than just those who fight in it.

As an aside, the 12-year gestation period for bringing Hair to the screen was hardly record-breaking.  21 years passed between the 1947 opening of Finian’s Rainbow on Broadway and Francis Ford Coppola’s oddly-ossified 1968 film version, and this year’s release of Tim Burton’s take on Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street marks the 28-year mark since its 1979 premiere.  The all time record for bringing a show from stage to screen might belong to Michael Ritchie’s ill-advised and charmless adaptation of The Fantasticks, which brought the show to a completely disinterested audience a full 35 years after it began its legendarily long run off-Broadway.