Tom O'Horgan
Director

Newly surfaced from the depths of new York's theatrical underground is a forty-four year old director named Tom O'Horgan, the first of the off-off-Broadway people to succeed on Broadway.

It was O'Horgan, who through wildly flamboyant staging, transformed HAIR into an historic milestone on Broadway.

A veteran of many years experimentation and frustration in the basements and lofts of off-off-Broadway, he had finally succeeded in producing a new form of drama through the use of improvisational techniques, vigorous ensemble playing, a more physical style of acting, greater use of dance, music and puppets and pop-camp comedy - plus the Total Theatre concept in which the audience becomes an actual part of the play.

"I think of my work as a kinetic sculpture," says O'Horgan.  "I'd like to use the whole theatre as much as possible.  The audience should be able to move, to see what's going on all around them.  Michael Butler gave me free rein to do everything I wanted in HAIR.  Of course there were some limits.  I wanted to dress the ushers as hippies, but that posed some problems.  So I compromised and put the hippies in the aisles with the ushers."

O'Horgan, who first brought total nudity to the Broadway stage in HAIR, admits he is impressed with the world-wide acceptance the show has received.  "After all," he says "the kids are talking their own language.  They're expressing their own sex attitudes and they're laying it on the line about race and miscegenation.  The kids on stage are real and the audiences sense this.  We couldn't use professionals who aren't part of this scene.  It just wouldn't work.  Most of the kids in the cast were picked up in the streets."  "I understand these kids" he says.  "I feel closer to them than to my own generation.  I share the new generation's belief in putting more emphasis on the emotional, the sensuous element in life.  The nude scene expresses that.  I've been to be-ins where the kids have done just that - thrown off their clothes because they felt that way - they just wanted to express that barrier.  To me, that scene is very tasteful and vital.

"My true objective is just getting the vicarious joy of turning people on, making them respond, turning them on to their own sensual powers that are buried under layers of cement.  The people in commercial theatre are hung up on chandeliers because they insist that one-dimensional, verbal, Ibsenite theatre is the only theatre.  But this is an aberration of the 19th century.  If the ideas are the primary thing, its not theatre.  Theatre has always meant music, dance, art.  That's what the Greek theatre was.  That's what opera is.  To me, HAIR is closer to "THE MAGIC FLUTE" than anything we've had in a long, long time.
 

Bertrand Castelli
Executive Producer

"No, no, children, no rock and roll, please.  Simply sing 'Frere Jacques' or 'Sur le Pont D'Avignon'.  Thus began the Paris Auditions of HAIR under the guidance of Producer/Director Bertrand Castelli.  Bertrand is HAIR's very own Ambassador Plenipotentiary.  His past accomplishments are wide, varied and include opera, ballet, and a successful career as a playwright.  But for now, after being Mr. Indispensable to HAIR's American success, Bertrand has gone abroad.

In PAris, Munich, Acapulco, and Tokyo, Bertrand Castelli is Monsieur Hair, Herr Hair, Senor Hair, and Hair San.  HAIR's peripatetic Executive producer, and sometimes director, is very likely to be found one day on the Russian steppes saying "No darling, when you take off your clothes you face the front."
 

Julie Arenal
Dance Director

Julie Arenal has choreographed several productions for the Theatre Company of Boston including Marat/Sade, for the Loeb Theatre at Harvard, and for Atlanta's Municipal Theatre.  She has directed and choreographed the Stockholm production and restaged the London and Los Angeles editions of HAIR.  While in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, she worked at Atelje 212 and also set up HAIR.  She has just finished working on the premiere of Ionesco's Hunger and Thirst.  Julie has danced primarily with Anna Sokolow, Sophie Maslow, John Butler, Jack Cole and Jose Limon.  She teaches at the Herbert Berghof Studio and is married to actor Barry Primus.
 

Jules Fisher
Lighting Director

Mr. Fisher's most recent credits include the lighting for "Black Comedy," "You Know I Can't Hear You When The Water's Running" and "Promenade."  He discusses his ideas on lighting HAIR:  "The big thing is the freedom we have here.  We are not limited by the playwright saying "The sun comes up" or "Candles are brought into the room."  In HAIR the light, its color, drama and intensity are based on the tempo and temper of the music - and the emotions of what is happening.  We are no more bound by the naturalistic conventions than is HAIR itself.  Lights blink, change color, project up from the floor, down from the ceiling - take on a psychedelic life of their own."
 

Copyright Natoma productions.