Ragni, Gerome - John Simon

JOHN SIMON

[As an off-Broadway production] Hair was an unpretentious, charming, swinging little musical. Not without flaws, it was nevertheless youthful, zestful, tuneful, and brimful of life. In its new, Broadway version, it is merely fulsome. What happened? It would seem that the new producer was hellbent on giving uptowners a sensational revelation of how it really is; as part of that endeavor, he hired Tom O'Horgan [as director]…. Given his first go at Broadway, he was, like the producer, out to épater les bourgeois for all he was worth …; but, at the same time, care had to be exercised only to titillate the middle class, not to offend it. So, with shock and inoffensiveness as its contradictory aims, Hair was off on an internal collision course.

Typically, nudity, perversion, four-letter words were built up, whereas the story with its anti-war but also anti-bourgeois bias was either soft-pedaled or transmogrified into...

[The entire page is 346 words long]

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