So this movie itself isn't really that bad -- in a vacuum. However, it is pathetically terrible in comparison to the musical it's based, and it is a real disgrace to be called "Hair." It is absolutely nothing like the stage show whatsoever. And I'm not talking about re-arrangement of the tunes (which, yes, is there in spades), MAJOR changes of the characters (big time) or individual scenes. The whole vibe of the show is changed.
The stage show Hair was pretty cutting-edge in its time. Yes, it made news and was notorious for the nude "be-in" scene, but that was just the flashy part (excuse the pun). Frankly, the stage show was basically just a conglomeration of a bunch of different songs, each expressing a different theme of the times, with only the loosest of thread of plot connecting them. In fact, I don't even think there was much of a plot of the musical -- it was basically a few days in the life of this group of friends ("tribal" group / cooperative of hippies / youth) which was I guess supposed to represent a microcosm of different types of people in society, singing songs to each other about major issues of the day, with each humorously acting out various parts (The Government, The Parents, The Capitalists, etc.) In fact, I remember there being only one or two different things happen in the show -- the group sings songs to each other, they go to the be-in, there is some major massive drug trip, there is a bust, and Claude decides to leave the group and go to war. Yes Claude. I don't remember the whole Berger/Claude mixup thing in the show. Of course, that whole goofy element of the gang going to visit Claude at the base wasn't in the stage show -- the entire show took place in I think one spot where the hippies all lived.
The thing about the stage show which was so great, but which is so completely missing from the movie is a certain sense of formlessness, surrealism, abstraction / symbolism and defying of convention. To me that was the whole meaning behind "Hair" -- not any kind of cobbled-together story. While watching the show, you could never really tell whether something was "really happening" or whether it was just some sort of crazy symbolic allegory that one character was doing to prove some point to one of the other characters (or to the audience) or maybe just some random hallucination. There was a lot of ambiguity, and you were never really absolutely sure what was happening. Through the whole thing was sort of an underlying sense of dread and uncertainty, lurking underneath the happy hippy surface. A whole lot of social issues were addressed by the songs...which seems really missing from the music video-type delivery of the songs in the movie.
The show, I think really tried to play with a lot of the (then) conventions of musical theater -- besides just using rock songs and electric guitars and starring hippies. The sets were stark and symbolic, the actors were originally not professional actors or singers, there was no real three-act structure, there was a lot of breaking down of the third wall -- characters talking to and singing directly to the audience, etc. In fact, one of the productions that I saw had the characters from the show sitting in seats and chatting with audience members before the show started -- when the music started playing, they all slowly started walking towards the stage and hopped up on to it.
All this cool stuff and what makes hair "Hair" is wholly missing from the movie, which is nothing more than a straightforward attempt to make a conventional movie musical. Somebody decided that some sort of real story had to be written to link the songs together. Somebody decided to try and make it in a "realistic style" with no surrealistic elements (where are the jump-cuts, the time-slowing, the crazy-colors?) As a result, yes, all the songs are there, the characters are there, the "show" is there, but its not really "Hair." Besides, the whole re-tooling of the Claude character is annoying and takes away some real depth. In the show, Claude was always another one of the hippies, not some square outsider Okie that the tribe adopted for a couple of days. Claude represented an opposing philosophy in the group from Berger's. That way there was always a symbolic tension between the "Berger" way and the "Claude" way, that explained why some of the characters acted as they did and gave the audience two alternate ways of viewing the issues. That whole conflict exposed the irony that even within a group of supposedly love-all idyllic hippies there was an "us" vs. "them" element, that was the hallmark of the 70's. The movie jettisons that whole conflict and really does the themes of the show a disservice.
And yes, the arrangements of the songs in the movie just about eliminates all of the "60s-edge" of the soundrack. The trippy, Cream-like electric guitars are neutered, the edges are smoothed so that the songs sound sanitized and there is too much consistency in the way the songs sound to one another. One of the revolutionary (for the time) things about the music in the original show was that it incorporated songs from so many different genres -- straight rock, country, gospel, etc. -- each used for different effect and in doing so, needed to sound quite different from each other. This again, is eliminated in the movie.
So, in summary -- not a entirely bad movie in and of itself. The songs are fun. The problem is -- it's not "Hair." Instead, its really just an expensive toupee that hides a comb-over.
