Word: ragni
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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, 76, "has shown itself over and over again to be a very organic piece...
...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...
Written by Gerome Ragni and James Rado...
Fortunately, the answer provided by last week's Agassiz theater production is a resounding yes. Granted, the events depicted in Gerome Ragni and James Rado's play are ancient history to us, but the same is true of Antigone and Hamlet (two plays to which Hair owes a debt). Galt MacDermot's score (including favorites like "Aquarius") was as fresh and lively as ever...