It had been so long since even one song from a Broadway musical had reached the very top of the country's best seller music charts, that few people thought it would ever happen again.

Then, suddenly, an American tribal-love rock musical called HAIR was all over the nations airwaves.  Its original cast album was number one, destined to become the biggest seller of all time, and four of its songs, "Aquarius", "Let The Sun Shine In", "Hair", and "Good Morning Starshine" were racing the top ten, with "Where Do I Go?" and "Easy To Be Hard" soon to follow.

HAIR is now an international institution, with new companies springing up in the United States and throughout the world.  But it didn't quite begin that way.

It was back in the early part of 1967 that two infrequently employed actors named Gerome Ragni and James Rado walked into the office of manager/agent/musicologist Nat Shapiro, carrying a withered briefcase filled with notes and drawings on brown paper bags, napkins, and old envelopes which, when pieced together, turned out to be the first draft for the lyrics and script of HAIR.  Rado, Ragni and their work were dedicated to non-violence, love, exploration of the senses and a demonstrative rejection of materialism.  Their first concern was finding a suitable composer.

Shapiro introduced them to Galt MacDermot, and over 30, square looking Staten Island resident with four children, who somehow understood and loved the kind of music they were seeking.  Within 36 hours he had completed six songs and come up with a thousand ideas.  Within four days the show had been completed and was ready for a producer.

HAIR began making the rounds, but no one knew what to do with a free-style, 25-character folk-rock-oriented musical about a tribe of lovable kids who smoke pot, burn their draft cards and enjoy an infinite variety of sexual role-playing.  Producers and directors were intrigued but not convinced that it could be commercially practical.  Some were offended by its four-letter words and others by its put-down of the establishment.

Then along came Joseph Papp, who chose HAIR as the vehicle to launch his partially subsidized New York Shakespeare Festival at the downtown Public theater.  It opened for a limited eight-week engagement and was an immediate sell-out, but soon it had no where to go.

Michael Butler, a young, attractive, energetic and resourceful Chicago millionaire, was turned on by the show and then fell hopelessly in love with it.  Butler was determined to keep it alive, and so HAIR was moved lock, stock, and props to Cheetah, a mid-town discotheque, which was housed in a building scheduled for imminent demolition.

Taking over completely - buying the rights from Papp - Butler allowed the authors to revise the work without any restriction, and brought in Tom O'Horgan to enlarge the show's scope and give it a new dimension.  The work was begun and on April 29, 1968, HAIR was firmly transplanted at the Biltmore theatre on Broadway.

That the night would prove historic was something that no one at that time could predict.  But the reviews quickly confirmed that HAIR was indeed a milestone in the American musical theatre and that Broadway would never quite again be the same.

Since then, HAIR has indeed become an international institution. It is on its way to breaking every known box office record in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco, while continuing to flourish in London, PAris, Sydney, Dusseldorf, Tokyo, Stockholm, and behind the Iron Curtain in Belgrade.  Yearly grosses are topping $18,000,000, making it the most successful production in the history of the stage.  New productions keep springing up around the world, and several film companies have already bid well in excess of one million dollars for the movie rights.

"A musical of today rather than the day before yesterday," wrote New York Times critic Clive Barnes, about the memorable New York opening night.  And for producer Michael Butler it was a personal as well as an artistic triumph.  He had defied all of the formulae for producing a successful musical comedy.  He had risked a good slice of his personal fortune as well as his reputation for an off-beat innovative, long-haired, brash and daring venture, only to find himself at both ends of the rainbow - a pot of gold under each arm.

Copyright Natoma Productions.