Word: rado
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...Hair” was written in the 1960s by James Rado and George Ragne, with musical composition by Galt MacDermot. It follows the story of “The Tribe,” a group of politically active, long-haired Greenwich Village friends whose rebellion against the conservatism of their parents’ generation leads to struggles with racism...
...foundered on disagreements among the show's creators over whether and how it ought to be changed. Michael Butler, producer of the original Broadway show, has favored a faithful rendering, and his production in Los Angeles last year was well received. But Hair's surviving co-author, James Rado, who conceived and wrote the show in 1967 with Gerome Ragni (who died of cancer in 1991), has been more indulgent of changes--adding, subtracting and tinkering with the show in spurts over the years--and he has given this new production his seal of approval. "Hair," says Rado...
...Park. The stage is grass, and the actors emerge from the wings or over a back fence and are able to climb in and out of the audience with a single bound. A couple of new songs have been added (unused material from earlier versions of the show, says Rado), some lyrics have been updated, and the book has been streamlined and pared down. For audiences crowding into the early previews, it's clear that Hair has not just been revived; it has been reinvigorated and reclaimed as one of the great milestones in musical-theater history...
...Rado and Ragni were off-broadway actors and part of the downtown experimental-theater scene in the mid-'60s when they decided to write a musical that would express the new attitudes of the youth culture exploding around them: sexual experimentation, an openness to drugs, the rejection of middle-class values of all kinds and most of all a hatred for the Vietnam War. The creative process reflected this freewheeling, convention-defying spirit. To cast the show, Rado and Ragni scoured the streets of Greenwich Village for people with the right look. Early performances had an anarchic, anything-goes feel...
While working on the show, Rado and Ragni had seen a couple of men strip naked in Central Park as an expression of freedom, and that gave them the idea to have all the actors shed their clothes at the end of the first act. The nude scene was Hair's most notorious thumb in the eye of bourgeois inhibitions, though not all the actors were quite ready for the statement. Some were willing to disrobe, and some weren't; as an incentive, the producers offered a $1.50 bonus per show to any cast member who bared...