Hair

Hair, American musical that showcases the counterculture of the 1960s through a loosely connected series of sketches and songs that deride the Vietnam War and social conformity and celebrate sexual freedom, recreational drug use, racial equality, and individuality. Widely acknowledged as the first rock musical, Hair opened Off-Broadway at New York’s Public Theater in 1967 and then moved to Broadway in 1968. With music by Galt MacDermot and book and lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni, Hair billed itself as “the American tribal love-rock musical.”

Premise

Hair’s loose structure follows members of a hippie community called “the tribe” as they navigate the changing social landscape of the United States in the late 1960s. As an ensemble piece, the musical provides an opportunity for many of the tribe members to introduce themselves to the audience with a song illustrating their worldview, interests and obsessions, or current circumstances. One of the main characters, Claude, while wrestling with how to respond to his imminent draft into the U.S. Army and the Vietnam War, falls into a love triangle with tribe leader Berger and his girlfriend, Sheila.

Origins

Rado and Ragni met in 1964 while performing in an Off-Broadway production of Hang Down Your Head and Die, a musical revue about capital punishment. The two became friends and soon started working on Rado’s dream of writing a Broadway musical. They took as their subject the vibrant anti-war counterculture they encountered on the streets of Manhattan in the mid-1960s. They were soon joined by Canadian composer MacDermot (who later said he had never even heard of a “hippie” when Rado and Ragni approached him to write the show’s score), after which the trio struggled to find a producer until Ragni met Joseph Papp of the New York Public Theater in a chance encounter on a train to New York.

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The show played Off-Broadway for several weeks before catching the eye of theater director Michael Butler, who then hired director Tom O’Horgan with the ultimate goal of finding the show a home on Broadway. After the Biltmore Theater agreed to house the show, Hair became the first musical to transfer from Off-Broadway to Broadway, a trajectory that has since become common.

Because of their inability to find professional actors with long, unkempt hair, Rado and Ragni approached people on the street who looked the part and asked them if they could sing. Backstage on Broadway, the atmosphere was permissive and relaxed, with many performers openly smoking pot. The show’s Broadway run featured a number of performers who would later achieve considerable fame, including Diane Keaton, Sally Eaton, Melba Moore, Ben Vereen, and Michael Lee Aday (professionally known as Meat Loaf).

Reception

While reviews of the original Broadway production were largely positive, Hair shocked many audience members with its frank discussion of sex and drugs and irreverent criticism of American culture. The New York Times critic Clive Barnes’s 1968 review sums up much of what mainstream audiences considered disturbing and sometimes objectionable about the show:

Frequent references—frequent approving references—are made to the expanding benefits of drugs. Homosexuality is not frowned upon—one boy announces that he is in love with Mick Jagger, in terms unusually frank. The American flag is not desecrated—that would be a Federal offense, wouldn’t it?—but it is used in a manner that not everyone would call respectful. Christian ritual also comes in for a bad time, the authors approve enthusiastically of miscegenation, and one enterprising lyric catalogues somewhat arcane sexual practices more familiar to the pages of the “Kama Sutra” than The New York Times. So there—you have been warned. 

Barnes’s otherwise comprehensive review seemingly omits one of the show’s most controversial elements: the group nude scene that closes the first act, which O’Horgan added to the show for its Broadway transfer.

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Despite, or perhaps because of, the musical’s unconventional content and structure, Hair became hugely popular, leading critics to sing its praises well into the 21st century. The Guardian described it as a “social and cultural phenomenon,” and The New York Times called it a “memorable” work that “redefines its medium and reframes the culture at large.”

Legacy

Hair’s popularity has proved enduring. After winning a 1969 Grammy Award for best score from an original cast show album, many of Hair’s songs were covered by rock and pop groups and became top 10 hits, such as “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In” by the Fifth Dimension and “Easy to Be Hard” by Three Dog Night.

Hair was loosely adapted into a movie musical in 1979 by Czech director Milos Forman, with choreography by American dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp. In addition to myriad productions in London’s West End and throughout the world, as of 2024, Hair has seen three Broadway revivals, in 1977, 2009, and 2011.

Some critics consider Hair to be the first concept musical to reach a mass audience, and its innovative presentation is widely understood to have opened the door to the nonlinear concept musicals of the late 20th century, such as Company (1970), A Chorus Line (1975), and Cats (1981), as well as other so-called “rock musicals,” such as Godspell (1976), Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), and Rent (1996).