For all its hippy-drippy dawning of the Age of Aquarius aspect, Hair (1967), the first theatrical rock musical – billed at the time as “the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” – had its roots in both the vibrant, radical off-Broadway theatre of the mid-1960s and the emotions, experience and political anger of the writers and actors involved.
The lyrics and libretto were the work of James Rado, who has died aged 90, and his colleague and sometime lover Gerome Ragni, who had participated in that off-Broadway ideological maelstrom with Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre and Ellen Stewart’s La Mama.
