Hair

Other than providing the full stop to his would-be '60s trilogy (previous episodes: Taking Off and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), it's difficult to determine what could have attracted Forman to a musical as hopelessly leaden as Hair and its uneasy amalgam of draft-card burning, cosmic consciousness, ill-judged comedy and dopey sentimentality. Sounding, and for the most part looking, like a National Lampoon parody of some ghastly Swinging Sixties compendium, it lacks even the vitality of the stage show (books/lyrics James Rado, Gerome Ragni), which was at least persuasively ingenuous. The problem with Hair is that it's neither old enough to have acquired the picturesque dignity of a period piece, nor young enough to have the slightest contemporary relevance. The result is a smug, banal fairytale-with-a-message, redeemed only by the intermittently imaginative staging of the songs.