Obituary| James Rado, co-creator of musical Hair dies at 90

The 90-year-old actor, director, playwright and composer James Rado (born James Alexander Radomski), who co-created the era-defining 1967 Broadway musical Hair, passed away in New York on Tuesday. The cause of death was heart failure, according to his publicist. Alongside the late Gerome Ragni, Rado began staging Hair off-Broadway and following its Broadway release, the musical became a kind of metonym for 1960s America, especially the hippie counterculture and the growing public opposition to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Hair is considered to be one of the pioneering influences on the modern-day Broadway show, and perhaps the first-ever ‘rock musical’ and many of its songs, including the climactic ‘Let the Sunshine In’, became staples at theatrical auditions. The album featuring the voices of the original cast sold millions of copies and spawned a legion of imitators. In 1979, the Miloš Forman-directed movie version cemented Hair’s legacy as an American classic and was nominated for a bunch of awards, although both Forman and Rado expressed their frustration at a number of key songs being cut from the final version to keep the film’s runtime under two hours. During the 1960s, when Rado was building an acting career in New York theatrical circles, he and Ragni began to write the first songs from Hair while sitting in cafes and bars in Greenwich Village, which came to be known as one of the epicenters of the counterculture—writers, musicians, artists and bohemians of every stripe filled these places back then. In fact, the central conceit of Hair—describing a loosely connected group (referred to as ‘The Tribe’) of young, long-haired hippie characters and their respective reactions to the Vietnam War—was inspired by Rado and Ragni’s experiences with these people. Eventually, the duo finished their work out of a rented apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey. There were several firsts Hair achieved—one third of its cast was African-American, to begin with, a highly unusual development for its time (this was also the first show to feature nudity and a same-sex kiss as well). In the song ‘Colored Spade’, Rado and Ragni rattle off a long list of racial epithets used for African-Americans in the 1960s while introducing the character of Hud, a militant Black man intended to be a cross between a hippie and a member of the Black Panther party. Typical for the hippie movement, the ‘make love, not war’ sentiment was dominant. One of the chants made popular by the play was “Black, white, yellow, red. Copulate in a king-sized bed.” At a different point in the play, Rado’s character says “The draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people” In the song Aquarius, Rado’s (and the hippies’) interest in sun signs comes to the fore. “Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding. No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind’s true liberation. Aquarius” These characters (led by Claude Bukowski, played by Rado himself, a young man who has just been drafted into the Vietnam War) were dancing all across New York City, handing out anti-war pamphlets and advising other young people on strategies to “dodge the draft” (avoid compulsory military conscription). Their generous usage of cuss words as well as their uninhibited expressions of sexuality made Hair controversial but also very popular and readily recognizable to the lay person. Latter-day rock musicals like Jesus Christ Superstar owe a huge debt to Hair. Much later, over a decade after Ragni’s death in 1991, Rado admitted that he and Ragni had been lovers once, describing himself as “omnisexual” (what people today would call ‘pansexual’). The two did collaborate on another musical in the late 70s, called Jack Sound and His Dog Star Blowing His Final Trumpet on the Day of Doom. In 2011, as part of the Occupy Wall Street protests, Rado performed songs from the rock musical Barcode (on which he was a creative consultant) The infectious sense of joy that Rado’s works brought to stage and screen can be sampled through the ending of the Steve Carrell movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin, where Carrell and his fellow cast members—Jane Lynch, Catherine Keener, Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd et al—perform a cover version of ‘Let The Sunshine In’, deploying their formidable comic talents while at it. That sense of joy and community shall remain Rado’s most enduring legacy. Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels. Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News,  India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.