Hoboken was the birthplace of a cultural milestone that portrayed the hippie culture of the 1960s in Broadway musical theater.
The book and lyrics of Hair were conceived and written on the top floor of a Hoboken apartment building by James Rado and Gerome Ragni, two out-of-work actors.
Rado and Ragni wanted to use the Broadway musical form, but to infuse it with the rock and roll idiom and capture the spirit of the ’60s.
Rado and Ragni presented their ideas for a Broadway play to many producers and were rejected over and over before producer Joseph Papp chose it as the first production for the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater.
The writers hooked up with composer Galt MacDermot, who wrote the score after immersing himself in the hippie rock culture.
The show opened for a six-week run at the Public Theater on Oct. 17, 1967. After the end of the run, the writers looked for a new venue, finally placing it in a disco called the Cheetah on Broadway between 45th and 46th streets.
After many more changes, including revisions to the script and a new director, the play did arrive in a Broadway theater, the Biltmore Theater, on 47th Street.
A lasting impression
The show went on to greater success. It spawned several hit singles, including “Hair” by the Cowsills, “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In” by the Fifth Dimension, “Easy to be Hard” by Three Dog Night and “Good Morning Starshine” by a singer who just called himself Oliver. The play was later adapted for a movie. Ragni died in 1991, but Rado still lives in Hoboken today.
Hair remains significant in musical history for its role as a breakthrough in introducing rock and roll to Broadway musical theater, which was a very strange innovation at the time. It led to other experiments in the same vein, including The Who’s rock opera Tommy in 1969, and the work of Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice, beginning in 1968 with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar in 1972.
Today, Broadway has well assimilated rock music, along with rhythm and blues, Reggae, and African music. The opening of the Broadway musical form to rock and roll and other musical styles gave it new life and led to a new golden age on Broadway. Some credit for that must be given to Rado, Ragni and MacDermot.
All of the past columns from this year-long series are now available online by visiting www.hobokenreporter.com, scrolling down the left-hand side of the page, and clicking on “150th Anniversary.”