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.
