Billed as "The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical," Hair made history as the first rock-music-based musical to hit Broadway. It made history again by running for four years and 1,742 performances. Its beginnings, however, were inauspicious.

Hair is the brainchild of two, "in-between-jobs" actors, James Rado and Gerome Ragni who "wanted to create something new, something different, something that translated to the stage the wonderful excitement we felt in the streets." They spoke with producer Joseph Papp about the Hair scenario and Papp suggested the two set the book to music in time to open a new theater. Rado and Ragni contracted composer Galt MacDermot. A Canadian by birth and a lover of jazz, MacDermot quickly became familiar with Hippie culture and the popular music favored by American youth.

Hair opened at the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater on October 17, 1967 for a run of six weeks, after which Michael Butler and Papp moved it to a disco, Cheetah, on Broadway. Hair closed shortly thereafter because of financial problems and Papp abandoned the project. While Butler search for a new venue, Ragni and Rado rewrote the story and songs and contracted a new director, Tom O'Horgan, who suggested Rado sing the role of Claude and rehearsed the cast for three months, until the Biltmore Theater, located on 47th Street, agreed to stage Hair; it opened on April 28, 1968 and ran until July 1, 1972. In 1969, Hair was nominated for, but did not win, two Tony Awards: Best Musical Play and Best Director of a Musical Play.

Hair established a trail of controversy, in large part because of the full frontal nudity during the number, "What a Piece of Work is Man." Notable attempts to ban the play occurred in Boston in 1970 and in Chattanooga in 1975.

Hair remains an important part of American theater repertory because of both its effective music and its representation, streamlined and stereotyped as it may be, of the "hippiedom" of the mid- to late-1960s. As a picture of the counterculture of the time, Hair, as critic Clive Barnes writes, "summed it up better than any other piece of American theatre." The central character, Claude, is torn from the life he wants to live—a life of peace and love within the Tribe—by the world outside of his circle—a world that wants to send him to kill in a foreign land. Generally described as a "non-book vehicle," the plotless story of Hair has as powerful a message as any other work for the stage.

Ragni and Rado have a flair for word-play, evident in "Donna," sung by Berger. While looking for a "sixteen-year-old virgin" named "Donna," Berger reiterates "lookin' for my Donna," in a way that makes "my Donna" change to "Madonna." The reference is, of course, not to the pop singer who in 2000 butchered Don McLean's American Pie, but the mother of Jesus of Nazareth. A reference to Jesus appears also in the title song when Claude and Berger point out that they wear their "hair like Jesus wore it" and that "Mary loved her son, [so] why don't my mother love me?" Rado and Ragni are careful to allow the Tribe a little self criticism in "Easy To Be Hard," one of MacDermot's most successful settings. Most poignant are Claude's "Where Do I Go," about the eternal human quest for meaning, and the climactic "Flesh Failures" a penetrating, pessimistic lyric that applies as well to the human condition in 2001 as it did to that of 1967 or, indeed, to any year after the industrial revolution.

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