TORONTO STAR
(Toronto, Canada)
March 25, 2006, pp. H1+

Copyright © 2006 Toronto Star. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Fully Grown

After 40 years and hundreds of productions, something remarkable happened--Hair became relevant again

By Richard Ouzounian
Toronto Star

     Remember the catchphrase "Don't trust anyone over 30" that loomed large in the '60s?

     Well, Hair, the musical that helped define that decade, is about to turn 40.

     It was back in the spring of 1966, when a pair of New York actors between jobs started writing a show that would wind up changing the face of theatre.

     One of them was James Rado, who had just played the role of Richard the Lionheart in the original production of The Lion in Winter.

     The other was Gerome Ragni, about to begin rehearsals for the first new-style antiwar protest play, Viet Rock.

     Together they created Hair, "the tribal love rock musical," which first came to Toronto in 1970, and opens at Can-Stage's Bluma Appel Theatre next Thursday night.

     Before the show finally premiered on Broadway in 1968, this duo would be joined by an organ-playing jazz musician from Montreal and a multi-millionaire playboy who happened to be a leftist activist.

     Finally, the moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter aligned with Mars...

     Rado smiles on this bright early spring morning, a toque on his head and his face crinkling like a baked apple.

     Some say he's as old as 74, but when Hair was first produced off-Broadway, The New York Times called him 28--which would make him 67 today.

     He's a soft-spoken man, clutching a bag with "20 hole-punched copies of a brand new scene" that he's giving the cast to rehearse.

     With hundreds of productions around the world, you'd think a man would want to say, "Enough!" But after all this time, Rado still doesn't want his Hair to stop growing. That's why he's in Toronto.

     "I've been working on the show a lot in recent years, trying to enhance it, make the characters stronger..."

     What fuels his obsession? Start with the hero's name. Claude Bukowski. Not that different from the one his creator was born with, James Radomski.

     "I guess that was a little egotistical of me," blushes Rado. "Yes, Claude was me inside. He was modeled on a guy I met at St. Mark's Place in the East Village. A man with a gentle nature. I could identify with that."

     And Ragni, who died of cancer at age 48 in 1991, was the sensual anarchist, Berger. Mentioning him puts a silence in the air before Rado can speak.

     "From the very first moment I met Gerry, I thought he was this wild, funny guy who could make me laugh and could talk me into anything."

     The two got together in a 1964 off-Broadway show about capital punishment called Hang Down Your Head and Die. It only lasted one night, but the friendship endured.

     Ragni had gotten married in 1963 and the charged dynamic of him, his wife Stephanie, and Rado would find its way into the show they were writing, with its triangle of draft-dodger Claude, hedonist Berger and hippie-chick Sheila.

     "I always felt Hair was autobiographical," says Michael Butler, the show's Broadway producer. It was "about the relationship between Jim and Gerry and Stephanie and how they never really could work it out."

     Rado says he can't recall exactly how he and Ragni started writing Hair.

     "I can't pin down the actual moment. I had done the lyrics to one song, 'Where Do I Go?' and I showed it to Gerry. He gave me a poem of his, which was 'Ain't Got No.' We put those things together and we just took off."

     Rado's eyes blaze once again with the fire of youth. "We knew one thing. It was going to be about Vietnam."

     The two young men poured everything onto the page--their anger at the burgeoning war, their confusion over their own relationships and the strange irony of a movement dedicated to peace and love being born in the middle of war and hate.

     They showed their rough script to a record and stage producer named Nat Shapiro, who asked them about the music.

     "We'll make it up during rehearsals," insisted Rado and Ragni.

     "No you won't," said Shapiro and introduced them to Galt MacDermot.

     At the time, MacDermot was a 37-year-old organist living on Staten Island, as far from the hip East Village as you could get.

     He had been born in Montreal, raised in Toronto and spent several years in South Africa. Returning to Canada, he took a composition course at McGill, which allowed him to write the enormously successful 1957 student revue, My Fur Lady.

     Then he composed some jazz pieces and one of them, "African Waltz," became enough of a hit for him to move first to London and later New York City.

     Shapiro thought of MacDermot when Rado and Ragni needed a music man.

     "They were very amusing, smart guys," recalls MacDermot during an interview in his N.Y.C. apartment. "A little weird with long hair and that, but I liked them."

     He liked their script too and started setting it to music. When he had enough done, they brought it to Joseph Papp, just about to open his Public Theatre on Lafayette St.

     "Papp was a guy who loved music," says MacDermot fondly. "I don't think anyone else would have taken a chance on us."

     MacDermot also recalls a lot of what was originally intended to be spoken poetry being thrust at him to set to music.

     "'Frank Mills' was originally a poem; so was 'The Flesh Failures'. A lot of '3500' was lifted directly from Allen Ginsberg. It was Gerry who kept saying, 'Talking doesn't work on stage. Let's turn it into music.'"

     The show opened on Oct. 29 and got good enough reviews to spark interest in it, but Rado wasn't happy. "I saw the promise of it, but I was unsatisfied and saw the possibilities of improving it."

     Enter Michael Butler.

     Butler was (and is) a true original. The scion of one of the Midwest's richest families, he vacillated between being a polo-playing hedonist and a socially aware activist. He was an adviser to John Kennedy on Indian and Middle Eastern affairs and ran against the Republican establishment in Illinois as an anti-war candidate.

     He saw Hair and loved it. Not for its groovy music and sexy trappings, but because of the message underneath.

     "I got into Hair because of politics," said Butler on the phone from California, "and I feel it still has a very pertinent and important message for today."

     He tried to enter into a partnership with Papp, but it went nowhere. Butler briefly moved the show to a disco named Cheetah, then closed it down for a total overhaul.

     Tom O'Horgan, the hippest of all the period's directors, took the project on and started slashing the already-thin script, adding more music, as well as a controversial nude scene for the company.

     "We wrote 13 new songs and kept cutting more and more of the book out," says Rado, who had also stepped into the leading role of Claude.

     It opened on Apr. 29, 1968 to love-hate reviews, but instantly became the smash of the decade, spawning a whole series of hit singles and 12 simultaneous productions around the globe, as well as launching a whole galaxy of starry careers.

     But Rado and Ragni had trouble dealing with their fame.

     "We weren't really living the hippie life," explains Rado, "but we were drawn into it and the dividing line between what was happening on stage and in our lives began to blur."

     Butler finally had to bar the authors from appearing in their own show when their antics and constant tinkering grew too much. "I love Hair and I love Jim Rado," declares Butler, "but I just wish he'd leave the show alone."

     Rado and Ragni went their separate ways for a while, each writing their own musicals. Rado's was the moderately successful Rainbow, while Ragni's was the monumental failure Dude. They reunited late in Ragni's life and created another show, Sun, which has never been produced.

     "I never became that rich, actually," says Rado wistfully. "There's a steady stream of money, but I've never seen a million dollars in the bank." He grins. "Maybe there's something wrong somewhere."

     The passing years weren't kind to Hair and numerous revivals crashed and burned, mainly because they tried to cash in on the show as a piece of late '60s memorabilia.

     "I have a friend," observes Rado, "who says that nostalgia is always the death of art."

     But during the last year, the tide has turned, with an increasing awareness of how America's involvement in Iraq mirrors its previous history in Vietnam.

     In Rado's words, "The political climate has become very similar and those of us who lived through those times can see the parallel." Successful recent productions as far apart as London and Alaska have tapped into the show's enduring resonance.

     As Michael Butler puts it, "Hair is about freedom, peace and love. Its lessons are permanent and universal."

     In other words, we're still waiting for the age of Aquarius to dawn.

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The Hutchinson Dictionary of the Arts  2004; Lexile Score: 1190; 2K, SIRS Renaissance