NBC taps inner hippie with 'Hair Live!' as next musical, set for spring

This is the dawning of another NBC musical: a spring adaptation of the groundbreaking rock musical, Hair.

NBC Thursday announced its next musical extravaganza, Hair Live!, set for broadcast in front of a live audience next spring.  

Hair Live! is based on the late '60s off-Broadway and Broadway hit and is a rock musical contemporary of NBC's recent, critically acclaimed Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert. 

The musical, which delivered a message of peace during the anti-Vietnam War movement and featured an integrated cast, is famous for such songs as Hair, (The Age of) Aquarius, Let the Sun Shine In, Good Morning Starshine, Manchester, England and Frank Mills. It returned as a Broadway revival in 2009.

Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, who produced Jesus Christ Superstar and the live NBC musicals before it, will serve as executive producers of Hair Live!

“These songs are part of the vocabulary of popular music, and this rebellious story of young people protesting and standing up for what they believe in is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago," NBC Entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt said in a statement.

Hair Live! follows "a group of politically active hippies living a bohemian life in New York while fighting against and resisting the Vietnam War. Claude, his good friends Berger and Sheila and their 'tribe' are coming of age in the world of the sexual revolution while struggling with their rebellion against the war and their conservative parents and society," according to NBC's description.

"Claude must decide whether to resist the draft as his friends have done, or succumb to the pressures of conservative America to serve in Vietnam, compromising his principles and beliefs."