Dates for Hair
The best-known stage work linked to the hippie movement is Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical. It opened Off-Broadway at the Public Theater, run by Joseph Papp, on 17 October 1967. It did not open on Broadway until April 1968, after a revised version was produced in a new theatre. That means the Broadway production belongs to 1968, not 1967, although the show’s origins and early run were part of the 1967 scene.
Theatre before Hair
Hair arrived at the end of a long period of experiment. Theatre groups in the early 1960s had begun to question the usual relationship between stage and audience, and two of them are especially relevant to the counterculture.
The San Francisco Mime Troupe
The San Francisco Mime Troupe was founded in 1959 by R. G. Davis. In the early 1960s it moved toward commedia dell’arte, a style of broad, physical comedy with stock characters, and it performed outdoors in parks, where it could reach audiences who rarely attended theatres. Its plays dealt with politics, race and the Vietnam War.
In 1965 the company clashed with the city over performing in a park without a permit, and Davis was arrested. A benefit event for the troupe, held in the autumn of that year, is often cited as an early step in the growth of San Francisco’s rock dance scene, since Bill Graham helped organise it. Several people associated with the troupe later helped form the Diggers, who staged street events and gave away food. The Digger free food programme was one of the best-known examples of this blurring of theatre and community action.
The Living Theatre
The Living Theatre was founded in New York in 1947 by Julian Beck and Judith Malina. It became known for work that tried to break down the barrier between performers and audience, and for its pacifist, anarchist outlook. After financial and legal trouble in the early 1960s, the company moved to Europe in 1964 and spent several years working there.
For that reason, the Living Theatre’s best-known American impact came a little later, when it toured the United States in 1968 with Paradise Now, a piece that invited audience participation. In 1967 it was operating mostly in Europe, but its example was widely known to American experimental artists. Off-Off-Broadway theatre, based in small venues and cafes in New York, supplied much of the practical space for such work.
How Hair began
Hair was written by Gerome Ragni and James Rado, two actors who spent time among the young people of the East Village. The music was by Galt MacDermot. The show had no conventional plot. It followed a group of young people, a “tribe”, with long hair, and a young man who has been called up to serve and must decide whether to burn his draft card or submit. The Selective Service draft was at the heart of that story, and it reflected a real dilemma for many American men at the time.
At the Public Theater the production was directed by Gerald Freedman and ran for several weeks in late 1967. Reviewers noted its energy and loose structure. It later moved to a discotheque venue before being reworked for Broadway, where Tom O’Horgan directed the version that opened in April 1968 at the Biltmore Theatre.
Why it caused controversy
Hair included frank language, references to drugs and sex, and a scene with brief nudity. It also showed disrespect for the American flag. These elements drew objections from some critics and officials, and productions in other places faced legal challenges and attempts to ban them.
Supporters saw it as honest, and as an effort to put the feelings of a generation in front of a mainstream audience. Critics from the counterculture sometimes argued the opposite, that a commercial musical was a diluted version of a movement. The songs “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In” later reached a large audience, in a medley recorded by the 5th Dimension that became a major hit in 1969.
What it showed
Hair did several things at once. It demonstrated that the counterculture’s look and sound could be taken to Broadway, and it was an early example of rock-influenced music in musical theatre. It also illustrated the broader pattern in which ideas first tried out in small, noncommercial settings were later adapted for the mass market.
The earlier groups, meanwhile, remained committed to the idea of theatre as a political act. The Mime Troupe and the Living Theatre had pursued it outside the commercial system, and Hair was the point where the experiment reached the commercial mainstream.