Actor, playwright and lyricist who co-wrote 1960s hippy rock musical Hair
One day in 1965 James Rado was in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York with his friend and lover Jerry Ragni, when he noticed a painting by the pop artist Jim Dine called Hair.
‘‘I thought what an odd title and called it to Jerry’s attention and we were both knocked out,’’ he recalled.
At the time Rado and Ragni were already working on a musical intended to put the nascent hippy counterculture of peace, love and rock’n’roll on the Broadway stage and their opus now had a title.
‘‘I was very drawn to the idealism of the hippies,’’ said
Rado, who grew his own hair in solidarity. ‘‘I felt it was almost spiritual, a cause. People were communicating in their own way, trying to form a culture, a new way of living based on this notion of love, for humanity and for each other.’’
It would take another two years before Hair debuted with a six-week run in late 1967 at a small theatre in Greenwich Village. ‘‘Jerry and I had written Hair for the uptown big theatre audiences,’’ Rado admitted. ‘‘But we couldn’t get a tumble from any of the Broadway producers. ‘Not our cup of tea,’ they would say.’’
Yet with its zeitgeist topicality and mishmash of a story taking in love-ins, drugs, antiwar protests, draft card burning, hippie utopianism and Aquarian Age dreaming, Rado and Ragni’s ‘‘American tribal love-rock musical’’, with added songs by Galt MacDermot, was a sensation.
By April 1968 it had transferred uptown to the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway, where it ran for four years. When it transferred to London it ran for even longer, clocking up almost 2000 performances. The original Broadway cast recording sold three million copies and songs, including Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In; Ain’t Got No, I Got Life; Easy To Be Hard, Good Morning Starshine and the title song, became Top Ten hits.
The show’s themes and its nudity and use of four-letter words provoked spluttering outrage in more conservative circles. The nude scene at the end of Act I was particularly controversial and was dropped from the original Greenwich Village production. However, when Rado discovered that there was no law in New York against nudity on stage as long as the performers were standing still, it was reinstated.
Hair’s London opening was delayed until the parliamentary legislation abolishing theatre censorship had been passed and it became the first West End show to benefit from the liberalisation.
On its opening in the autumn of 1968 The Daily Telegraph dismissed the production as ‘‘a complete bore - noisy, ugly.’’ However, Irving Wardle, the Times theatre critic, took a more positive view. ‘‘Its honesty and passion give it the quality of a true theatrical celebration - the joyous sound of a group of people telling the world exactly what they feel,’’ he said.
When Newsweek called Hair ‘‘the greatest global cultural event of the ’60s’’, Rado claimed vindication.
Certainly its influence was all-pervasive as Hair became a touchstone for a vibrant marriage of theatre and rock music that ran from Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell via Rent and Mamma Mia! all the way to Hamilton.
Hair was revived numerous times, on Broadway, in the West End and around the world. ‘‘I think the reason it still works today is that it managed to capture a rare point in time when the philosophy of personal freedom was put into practice,’’ Rado said in 1993, when Michael Bogdanov staged a revival at London’s Old Vic.
‘‘That freedom provided the right to experiment and there were very fine things to remember about the era, to be learnt. Hair captures the best.’’
The show’s success was all the sweeter given the unpromising start to Rado and Ragni’s collaboration, which began when they met while both appearing in an off-Broadway show in 1964 about capital punishment. Titled Hang Down Your Head And Die, it closed after a single night.
Rado, who did not identify as gay but as ‘‘omnisexual’’, never married and called Ragni, who died in 1991, the love of his life. ‘‘It was a passionate kind of relationship that we directed into creativity. Hair was our baby in a way,’’ he said.
He was born James Alexander Radomski in Los Angeles, the son of Blanche (nee Bukowski) and Alexander Radomski, a sociologist and university lecturer. He grew up variously in upstate New York and Washington and graduated in speech and drama from the University of Maryland, where he co-wrote two musicals which were produced on campus.
After two years in the US navy, he studied theatre as a graduate student at the Catholic University of America in Washington. By 1961 he had moved to New York, where he took method acting classes with Lee Strasberg, wrote Brill Building-style pop songs, formed a band called James Alexander and the Argyles, and supported himself with a day job as an office worker.
He kept up his acting even after he had begun to write Hair and intended to play the musical’s protagonist Claude Hooper Bukowski himself. The director of the show’s first run in Greenwich Village told him that at 35 he was too old for the part but when the show transferred to Broadway he got his way and eagerly took the role he had written for himself, joining Ragni in the cast.
The success of Hair for a while ruptured his relationship with Ragni and they pursued separate projects. ‘‘We couldn’t be in a room together, we would burst into an argument,’’ Rado recalled. With his brother Ted he wrote the music, lyrics and book for a Hair sequel called The Rainbow Rainbeam Radio Roadshow, which ran Off Broadway in 1972, while Ragni and MacDermot collaborated on their own post-Hair musical, Dude, which flopped. By 1974 Rado and Ragni had reunited to write Sun (Audio Movie), an eco musical about pollution and the environment. They followed it with Jack Sound and His Dog Star Blowing His Final Trumpet on the Day of Doom (1978).
When it became obvious that nothing was going to match their previous success, Rado returned to Hair, developing and directing new productions. At one point the show was playing simultaneously in ten American cities. ‘‘Hair had the hypnotic aura of a miracle about it,’’ Rado said in 2009 when a Broadway revival of the show won a Tony Award. ‘‘Can you say you were there? Fortunately, I can and I helped.’’
actor/writer b January 23, 1932
d June 21, 2022.
‘‘I was very drawn to the idealism of the hippies.’’
James Rado