"Hair.": Musical Vs. Movie.

(Originally posted on 7-3-2010)

So I know I shouldn't have watched the movie "Hair" since I know it is supposed to suck in comparison to the musical but I had to watch it anyway.

There was a lot wrong with this movie. A LOT. However, I think the most curious thing was the way they chose to represent the characters of Berger and Claude.

Berger in the movie IS Claude in the play MINUS the threat of war. All the songs in the musical that make Berger in any way unlikeable ("Easy to Be Hard" "Going Down") are changed and eliminated in favor of giving him most of Claude's songs. However, without the threat of war on his mind, he is carefree up until the point in which he is leaving for Vietnam by accident and only has "Flesh Failures/Eyes Look Your Last" until he's dead by "Let The Sunshine In." This makes the whole idea ineffective as he has no time to cope. Musical!Claude spends half the play wondering what he's going to do. We are sad Berger dies because we like him because he IS Musical!Claude and we like Musical!Claude too.

Meanwhile, Claude in the movie has no personality. He is completely bland and boring and when he sings "Where Do I Go?," the only time his drafting is really analyzed, the audience response can only be, "where ever, dude. We don't care." Because of his lack of personality, he appears to have little to no feelings on being drafted and this makes him unsympathetic by the time he sings this song. He doesn't care; we don't care.

This personality change is really part of the core of where this movie went wrong.

Also according to the movie:
* Claude is from Oklahoma, not Flushing, Queens like in the musical and is just chilling in New York for a few days before boot.
* Shelia isn't "NYU, second semester" but some prissy, rich chick with a crush on Berger after he crashed her party (and they all went to jail). Claude likes her. The homo-love between Claude and Berger is minimal in comparison but Berger seems to like Claude more than anyone else.
* Berger is the main character.
* Jeannie is pregnant with Hud's baby. Or Woof's. But she's pretty sure it's Hud's. Not that she cares. She's also not spacey like in the musical but flat-out stupid.
* Hud's name is Lafayette and he has a non-hippie baby mama who Jeannie "drafts" (geddit? because the Vietnam War is going on!) into the Tribe. She sings "Easy To Be Hard" instead of Sheila.
* The Tribe is really just Berger, Jeannie, Woof, and Hud. Claude and Shelia come in later. Sort of. Other than that, there's just a lot of random hippies in the park who go to shows together but don't seem to know each other.
* The acid trip sequence never happened. A shorter one did during "Hare Krishna" in which Claude fantasizes that he marries Shelia in a jacked up church.
* All the military men who inspect new recruits bodies are totally gay and not subtle about it. They sing "Black Boys" and "White Boys."
* Through a crazy random happenstance, Berger goes to war in Claude's place. Obviously with no military training and being that he's a private (*cough* bullet sponge) he kicks it and "Let The Sunshine In" starts being sung at his grave. Also, he sings "Manchester, England" ABOUT Claude in the beginning and then at the end he sings it because he "is" Claude. Oh how clever.
* This Claude doesn't have the "Claude" personality at all and is therefore, less lovable.
* The only themes that remained in the film were "the Vietnam War was very bad" and "hippie counterculture" stuff. A lot was lost.
* Songs that don't happen: "What A Piece Of Work Is Man", "Frank Mills", "Air", "I Believe In Love", "Going Down", and a bunch of smaller songs. Also many songs were used strangely. "Walking In Space" was over a military training montage. WTF?

So yeah, the movie kinda sucked really hard.

If you like the movie of "Hair" you will probably hate the musical and visa versa.