Gerome Ragni - James Rado - Galt MacDermot

Hair

Faculty of Theatre and Film, Cluj-Napoca

The performance is recommended for viewers above 16 years of age.

In the performance we use strong sound and light effects as well as a stroboscope.

The performance takes 2 hours and 50 minutes with an intermission.

In 1964 long haired young men went out in the streets and protested against conformism in New York. Gerome Ragni and James Rado caught an eye and went out of their way to create a musical about them. They started writing the same year the protests went on, they named the project Hair. The Grammy award winner songwriter Galt MacDermot joined the group in 1966. They created the characters, the writers included elements even from their own personalities in the lines of thw two main characters, thus the show debuted in 1967 in Public Theater, a on the off-Broadway scene, but it wouldn't become a hit until 1968, when they starred on Broadway, though not without causing controversy by virtue of the offensive nature of the language of the rebelling youngsters and their style wich seems to completely ignore long reigning societal conventions. It was common for the actors to be insulted, there were even incoming bomb threats at certain dates. The show was banned in Massechusetts in 1970, the main counsil later revoked the ban.

In the blink of an eye, the musical became a cult across the nation, they quickly sold more than 3 million copies of the Grammy award winning disk, while playing 1750 shows only in New York. The londoner audience welcomed it with love as well.

The american director of czech descent, Miloš Forman got hooked since 1968 and wanted to make the movie adaptation of the musical, it wouldn't come true until the late 70's.

The musical has been played for 50 years now, recently in 2017 both London and Broadway reworked the show.

Now what could we say about it ourselves? Beyond the beloved hits and the cultlike phenomenon, from our point of view humanity has gotten itself in a bad place, a position which obliges us to talk about war and maybe we can draw attention to a catastrophe that's coming if it is the case.