Hair Tickets

Hair is the classic, groundbreaking ‘60’s musical that was right on time in its time, and still holds up over forty years later. Hair is a rock musical, probably the first if not one of the first, that captured the hippie bohemian life, and the struggles of the ‘60’s. It was controversial at its time because of its onstage nudity, depiction of drug use, and frank discussion of political issues.

Hair Piece

Hair was created by James Rado and Gerome Ragni who wrote the play book and the lyrics (the music was written by Galt MacDermot). There was so much going on around them, the hippie energy of the ‘60’s, that they knew it would make a great stage production.

The main characters in the play were reportedly based on themselves, and hippies they knew around in New York, and some hippies they knew in New York also performed in the play. The musical score was written in three weeks.

Joseph Papp, the legendary Broadway producer and director decided to take Hair on. Papp usually ran the Shakespeare Festival, and this was his first non-Shakespearean production.

Hair debuted off Broadway in 1967, and it went to Broadway in April 1968, where the classic ending “Let the Sun Shine In” was added to the score to give the play a different ending. Hair would run on Broadway at the Biltmore (other major theaters were wary of the play’s controversy) for 1750 performances (it earned a Tony nomination for Best Musical). It also had a run of nearly two thousand performances in London, and over seventy versions of the play have been helmed.

Let the Sunshine In

Several regional productions of Hair ran for years, including running four years on Broadway, and two years in L.A. at the appropriately named Aquarius Theater. Michael Butler, who produced the play, saw Hair as an anti-war statement, and hoped the play would help bring the Vietnam war to an end.

Because of its anti-war message, onstage nudity, and depections of drug use, Hair was a controversial play that divided people, and caused some theater owners to refuse to book it (some lawsuits against the play later went as high as the Supreme Court). It ended government censorship of plays in England when Lord Chamberlain tried to ban the play.

Actors who performed in Hair include future rock star Meatloaf, Ted Neeley, who went on to play Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar, Ben Vereen, Phillip Michael Thomas from Miami Vice, Joe Mantegna, Richard O’ Brien, who created the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Tim Curry, who met O’Brien when they were performing together.

More Daring Than Ever

Although a late seventies stage revival didn’t take off, perhaps because it wasn’t far away enough from its initial run and the political turmoil of the sixties, when Hair came back to Broadway in 2009, it won the Tony and the Drama Desk Award for best revival, and Time raved that Hair today “seems, if anything, more daring than ever.”

Hair was also turned into a film in 1979 by Milos Foreman, who also directed One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Amadeus, and the film featured choreography by Twyla Tharp, who recently created the musical Come Fly With Me.