Hair the Musical

It's deceptive. It has an accumulative impact. I have always found it devastating.

^I actually really like Forman's film adaptation of Hair than the original musical due to adding a story and adding more to the characters (or changing some of them due to the new story), one of the most underrated musical movies of the late 70's an era when Hollywood was slowly no longer caring for musical films as a "go-to" genre.

^LOL, we should be twins dispite being born in two different decades (I was born in 1993).

The finale to the movie was really chilling and I would never get that feeling in a musical movie like that until Les Mis.

Updated On: 8/5/14 at 10:03 PM

^The original musical is good don't get me wrong, but I just can't connect with it as others have.

Gaveston, one of the best moments of the film is where Cheryl Barnes blows the roof off and makes me feel a bit emotional in her heart-renching rendition of "Easy To Be Hard" which blows the original out of the water.

^Can't tell if it's meant to be an insult. But we can agree do disagree on this.

I enjoy the movie for what it is, though I much prefer the stage version.

The most effective production I've seen of Hair was by a small amateur theatre company in Dallas in 1988. It was quite simple in its design, but the staging and choreography of the individual songs was really astounding. For example, the nudity was handled with only two cast members in the following ways:

In What a Piece of Work is Man, as the duet begins, two men drag a body bag onto the stage. The bag unzips from the inside and a beautiful naked man emerges. He goes through slow-motion choreography of the classic male anatomy "poses". Towards the end of the song, he climbs back in the bag, zips it up, and gets dragged off stage.

At the beginning of the Be-In, the music starts and a lone girl appears on stage in a thin white peasant dress. She starts twirling and her dress billows around her. As the lights come up on her, her dress becomes transparent and we see she is nude under the dress.

This was also the first time I heard the song Dead End and it instantly became my favorite song in the show. During Walking in Space, as Sheila sang her solo lines, she was lifted by the torso and passed among tribe as she "walked" levitating across the stage.

And the finale was DEVASTATING. I believe they used lines in the script where Woof, Sheila and Berger are looknig for Claude but can't find him. But they staged the scene in modern day in front of a representation of the Vietnam War Memorial in DC, so the lines of "Where's Claude?" and "I can't find him" were as they searched for his name on the memorial. When they find his name, Claude appears on top of the memorial covered in an army blanket. When he got to "That's me! That's me!", he removed the blanket and revealed his cut hair and a white t-shirt bearing a bloody target and we see him get shot to death as the songs returns to the tribe. The tribe sit on a floor surrounding the lead players and the memorial and sing to each other and THE ENTIRE CAST starts crying when they start Let the Sun Shine In, which then grows and transforms into its usual celebration of life and love. I still get chills when I think about it.

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To me, the more traditional narrative structure of the film (which excised much of the score), was the exact reverse intent of the show. Though the Broadway production cemented a less improvised production for commercial Broadway audiences, the conceptual aspect of its narrative structure remained intact, which was vital to the experience of the live show. The film had some lovely performances and beautiful choreography, but it almost completely removed the personal intimacy of the characters and cast, which was one of the most important aspects of relating the show to the audience. We were no longer getting "first hand" accounts of thoughts, experiences and opinions. We were getting a softer, more objective view of the characters and songs as filtered through the eyes of a pretty gosh-darn Midwestern boy on his first arrival into the Big City. Some nice moments in a story made easy to follow and tugs at the heartstrings in very conventional ways. But not the Hair "experience" at all.

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I really like the movie. I find the vignettes in the show to be dated but the piece as a whole works. Even at the Hollywood Bowl, when Hunter Parrish (Claude) comes out for the first time with short hair and in army fatigues with pain etched in his face and sings The Flesh Failures, it was very moving.

Mister Matt, I don't necessarily disagree with your point above, but I think Forman was smart about the differences in media.

The original stage HAIR aimed to make the spectator feel like he was actually attending a "happening". The actors came out into the house and audience members were encouraged to come up on stage. The script calls for the actors to wander at will on stage; lines and even roles were often swapped in different performances.

The problem with creating the same effect on film is the camera. The camera constantly reminds us that what we are watching took place in the past, because it was recorded on film and is being replayed for us. There's no way to make it truly "spontaneous" like the stage show.

So Forman wisely constructed a narrative that covers the same territory and then invited us in by allowing us to empathize with the protagonist. Not the same, but as close as film can really get.

As with "Cabaret", I love both the play and the film. Their differences do not bother me because each works on its own terms. Forman did a masterful job of adapting "Hair."

One number I think the movie version of Hair messed up was Walking in Space. It could have been really amazing, but they made it about war instead of drugs.

I will admit that I miss the real life and fictional characters from the trip out in "Walking in Space".