James Rado, co-creator of Hair, the hit Sixties ‘American tribal love-rock musical’ – obituary

James Rado, who has died aged 90, was an American actor and the co-creator, with Gerry Ragni, of Hair, the “American tribal love-rock musical”, as it was billed; since its first production in 1967 it is estimated to have been seen by more than a billion people.

Rado and Ragni met as cast members in an off-Broadway play that got such bad reviews it closed after the first night. They moved in together and in 1964, inspired by the burgeoning hippie movement around East Village, began writing the book and lyrics for a musical.

To Rado, in his mid-30s at the time, the hippies “seemed like creatures from outer space, so open, loving and beautiful”. He and Ragni began hanging out with them, attending their “be-ins” and letting their hair grow long: “Gerry and I thought we could write a show about all this.”

They pieced together the elements of Hair by roaming the streets, picking up slogans and slang from anti-Vietnam war banners and underground magazines, and observing the antics of New York’s blissed-out flower children.

The famous – or infamous – 20-second full-frontal nude scene in Hair was inspired by a “be-in” in Central Park, when two men in the crowd took off their clothes. “Everybody around was just amazed and astounded,” Rado recalled. “It was the perfect hippie happening, and we felt it had to be in the play.”

The partnership between the pair was complemented by the arrival of Galt MacDermot, son of a Canadian diplomat who had once earned a living as a church organist. Though a clean-cut jacket-and-tie man, he agreed to set their cosmic ruminations on the Age of Aquarius, tributes to hashish, LSD, onanism and other sexual practices (and, even more weirdly, “Manchester, England, England”) to music.

They had a stroke of luck when Ragni bumped into Joseph Papp, director of the New York Public Theatre, a not-for-profit group who had a new off-Broadway venue in East Village and needed a show to open it: “Two weeks later, we had the job.”

Their first problem, Rado recalled, was to find actors with long hair when there were none: “We’d find suitable people in the street and ask, ‘Do you sing?’ ”

The show opened on October 17 1967 with Ragni in the role of the hippie leader Berger. The plot – draftee about to be sent to Vietnam spends his last days as a civilian among his hippie friends, doing sex, drugs and rock and roll – was flimsy and few expected it to survive past its initial six week run.

That was until the intervention of Michael Butler, a Chicago businessman, who was so impressed he bought the rights and took it to Broadway, where it opened in April 1968 with Ragni as Berger and Rado as the gentle but doomed main character, Claude.

The Public Theater had banned the nude scene, but Tom O'Horgan, who directed the Broadway version, was enthusiastic – so much so that instead of just two people he got the entire cast to strip off, prompting the comedian Jack Benny’s joke, “Did you happen to notice if any of them were Jewish?”

Hair divided opinion sharply, with those at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum united in their disapproval, countercultural types seeing it as commercial and exploitative, conservative reviewers judging it blasphemous, anti-American and obscene.

Reviewers in London, where Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre on September 27 1968, were more restrained. The FT’s drama critic despaired of the plot but admired “three smashing girls” in the cast, while The Daily Telegraph’s septuagenarian critic W A Darlington “tried hard”, but found it “a complete bore – noisy, ugly and quite desperately funny”.

Most critics loved it, however. In Hair’s first year, three members of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle voted it best musical of the year. “What is so likable about Hair?” asked their doyen, Clive Barnes. “I think it is simply that it is so likable. So new, so fresh, and so unassuming, even in its pretensions.”

It went on to run on Broadway for nearly 2,000 performances (it had a similar run in London), earning two Tony nominations and a Grammy for Best Score From an Original Cast Show Album. Within a year 23 companies were performing Hair in 10 countries.

Hair may have mined every cliché of the hippie movement (on the wane by the time it opened) and set out to shock with its nudity and liberal use of four-letter words, but it boasted a glorious score that yielded a string of hits. Aquarius, Let the Sun Shine In, Good Morning Starshine and Ain’t Got No, I Got Life (covered famously by Nina Simone) all sprang on to the pop charts and featured in numerous cover versions.

Yet for Rado and Ragni the musical would prove something of a mixed blessing. According to Rado in a 2010 interview with the Telegraph’s Mick Brown, it did not make them rich: “I think we must have been screwed ... It keeps rolling in, but I’m always under a million.” Inevitably, it proved a hard act to follow.

Finding themselves in something of a cultural cul-de-sac, Rado and Ragni fell out over what to do next: “Gerry and I started fighting more and more. It had become too intense: we had to get away from each other.”

Though they were eventually reconciled before Ragni’s death in 1991, nothing they did afterwards was as successful as Hair. “There was a period when I couldn’t bear to listen to the music from the show any more,” Rado told Mick Brown.

James Alexander Radomski was born on January 23 1932 in Los Angeles. His father was a sociology professor. The family moved east and Rado was brought up in Irondequoit, a suburb of Rochester, upstate New York, then in Washington.

After studying speech and drama at the University of Maryland, and two years in the US navy, he did graduate theatre studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, then moved to New York, where he formed a pop band and studied method acting with Lee Strasberg.

He went on to star in Broadway and off-Broadway productions, most notably as Richard the Lionheart in James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter on Broadway in 1966. Then came Hair.

In his college days Rado had written music, and as he told Mick Brown, it was partly his desire to try his hand at composing again that led to the break up with Ragni.

Rado then collaborated with his brother Ted on a Hair sequel he called The Rainbow Rainbeam Radio Roadshow. Starring Meat Loaf, it ran for 48 performances off-Broadway in 1972.

Ragni, meanwhile, collaborated with Galt MacDermot on Dude, a musical that closed after 16 performances, prompting the New York Times to suggest that it “may go down in theatrical history as Broadway’s most monumental disaster”.

Rado and Ragni overcame their differences and in the mid-1970s, with MacDermot and Steve Margoshes, collaborated on Sun, a three-hour musical about “evolution, with an Odyssey plot” that was never produced.

In 1977 Ragni, Rado and Margoshes collaborated on a show with the catchy title Jack Sound and His Dog Star Blowing His Final Trumpet on the Day of Doom. It had a short run off-Broadway.

In 2008 Rado, who never married and described himself as “omnisexual”, confirmed what had long been an open secret among their friends, that he and Ragni had been lovers.

The following year he admitted that their relationship had inspired Hair. “We were in a love mode,” he recalled, “and this whole love movement started happening around us, so the show got it. Hair was our baby in a way, which is pretty cool.”

James Rado, born January 23 1932, died June 21 2022