James Rado, co-creator of the influential hippie-era rock musical Hair, has died at age 90.
Publicist Merle Frimark, Rado’s longtime good friend, confirmed the information to The New York Occasions, saying the Broadway legend died on Tuesday in Manhattan from cardio-respiratory arrest.
Rado was born in Venice, Calif., however raised in Rochester, N.Y., and Washington, D.C. Following a two-year Navy stint, he moved to New York, finding out appearing and writing music. The ’60s had been his breakout decade: In 1963, he landed an element within the Broadway play Marathon ’33 and took a task in The Lion in Winter three years later, enjoying Richard reverse Christopher Walken.
However he made his most profitable connection whereas performing within the October 1964 off-Broadway musical Hold Down Your Head and Die, assembly Gerome Ragni. After shifting into an house in New Jersey, the duo started collaborating on what grew to become Hair: An American Tribal Love-Rock Musical. crafting a ebook and lyrics that explored the last decade’s blooming counterculture and sexual liberation amid the Vietnam Battle. (Composer Galt MacDermot wrote the music.)
Hair made its off-Broadway debut in October 1967 and premiered on Broadway six months later. The musical was greeted with widespread controversy, together with church pickets and outrage over the present’s use of profanity, sexual references and, most notably, a nude scene throughout the music “The place Do I Go?”
However the musical additionally grew to become a cultural phenomenon — even spawning a profitable forged recording and a handful of hit singles, together with the fifth Dimension’s chart-topping “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” Three Canine Evening’s “Simple to Be Laborious” and Oliver’s “Good Morning, Starshine.”
Rado continued to work within the musical medium following Hair’s preliminary run, together with much less well-known titles like The Rainbow Rainbeam Radio Roadshow and Solar (Audio Film), the latter a reunion with Ragni. However his hottest undertaking nonetheless endures. “Hair had a non secular message,” Rado informed the Related Press in 1993. “And it has a mystical message I hope is coming via — there’s extra to life than the best way it has been devised for us, defined to us, taught to us.”
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