I have avoided Hair like the plague because, you know, dirty hippies dissing America and being unpatriotic.
I think that Hair is an excellent movie to watch, especially now, as it has certainly aged well and shows both the extremes of liberals and conservatives as well as the polarization of the two.
Each “side” is amazingly self-indulgent, half-cocked, and completely shameless and confident in their righteousness. I am always scared of righteousness because righteousness is almost always self-righteousness, which is always judgemental and destructive. The self-righteous are not courteous enough to be self-destructive but generally are outwardly destructive — willing to let their self-loathing be reinterpreted into hate, violence, and chaos.
Self-righteous defined:
1 Piously sure of one’s own righteousness; moralistic.
2 Exhibiting pious self-assurance: self-righteous remarks.
(Both sides, the liberals and conservatives of Hair, are both unbearably self-fucking-righteous. In fact, that was the worse thing about the 60s. Everybody spoke out and nobody fucking listened. Same thing with 2006 as in 1968)
Additionally, it shows how little has changed since Hair opened on Broadway on April 29, 1968.
More info on Hair
“Premier: April 29, 1968
Theater: Biltmore Theater
Music by: Gerome Ragni and James Rado
Lyrics by: Galt MacDermot
Book by: Gerome Ragni and James Rado
Directed by: Tom O’Horgan
Choreography by: Julie Arenal
Produced by: Michael Butler
By the late 1960s, it was only a matter of time before rock music — real rock music, not the Tin Pan Alley-spoof kind — hit Broadway. “Hair” came directly from Greenwich Village — Joseph Papp’s Off-Broadway Public Theater — a couple of blocks away from the real hippies changing the world down in Washington Square. “Hair” had no real plot, it was simply a revue, showing practically every aspect of the counterculture in a variety of musical styles, dance, and stage effects. Its encyclopedic psychedelia included mind-altering drugs, pollution, the Vietnam War, civil rights, astronauts, astrology, hairstyles, Shakespeare, and the Waverly movie theater on Sixth Avenue. And sex. “Hair” became internationally famous for a brief, dimly lit scene at the end of the first act when the entire company assembled in the nude.
The show’s nudity made it a first for a Broadway musical when it transferred uptown on April 29, 1968, as did its full rock score. “The American Tribal Love Rock Musical” reached parents who were curious about their kids and the kids themselves, who were compelled by the music. Although “Hair” did not produce the immediate revolution in Broadway music that critics had predicted, it did run nearly 2,000 performances and was the beginning of a diversification in the musical styles of the Broadway score.
Selected Original Cast:
Steve Curry (Woof), Sally Eaton (Jeannie), Diane Keaton (Waitress), Lynn Kellogg (Sheila), Melba Moore (Dionne), Shelley Plimpton (Crissy), James Rado (Claude), Gerome Ragni (Berger), Lamont Washington (Hud)”
