This Day in Theater History (“Hair” Opens in Censor-Free London)

September 27, 1968—In the West End, the London theater world celebrated its new artistic freedom from state censorship with the opening of an import from America: the musical Hair.

For some viewers of a certain cynical cast of mind, the “American Tribal Love-Rock Musical”, with its invocation of “The Age of Aquarius,” is likely to seem dated (the clothes, and the hair, of course!), premature (the younger generation did not, of course, inaugurate a new era of peace and understanding, anymore than similarly idealistic generations have done over the centuries), or misguided (sexual revolution and experimentation with mind-altering substances came with some costs, such as AIDS and drug addiction).

Ultimately, however, the musical genre lives and dies by one factor—songs—and 40 years after it stormed the Broadway and London stages, Hair’s (lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni, music by Galt McDermot) numbers endure. Amazingly, even when torn from their original stage context, several became Top 40 hits: “The Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” by the Fifth Dimension; “Good Morning Starshine,” by Oliver; and “Easy to be Hard,” by Three Dog Night. (The latter even wins the appreciation of prolific critic-blogger Terry Teachout, who otherwise possesses, at best, mixed feelings about the show.)

(By the way, speaking of the Fifth Dimension medley: Last year, the band—or what remained of it—performed it on a PBS fundraiser. The sight of baby boomers jumping up clapping and rocking made me seriously consider that there out to be a law against middle-aged, out-of-shape people dancing.)

The show appeared in London only one day after the crumbling of a symbolic wall of Jericho: approval by the Lord Chamberlain. Imbroglios of the twentieth century involving this supervision more often than not involved sex, but when state censorship was imposed in 1737, the eye of the state was far more focused on political criticism than carnal depictions.

Prime Minister Robert Walpole, who stayed in office for a record two decades by virtue of massive bribery, had grown tired of being ridiculed left and right on the London stage. Bad enough when John Gay sent him up in The Beggars’ Opera; now, nearly a decade later, Henry Fielding (a judge who would become famous for the novel Tom Jones) began nipping at his heels. Enough was enough, decided Walpole, how in 1737 pushed through the Licensing Act, which made the Lord Chamberlain the arbiter of theater taste—and effectively drove Fielding off the stage.

By the late 1950s, the censor's reason for being was being questioned. Within the next few years, the Lord Chamberlain’s office would be working harder–and taking more critical brickbats—than it ever imagined. Some playwrights produced sly end-arounds, such as Joe Orton, whose Entertaining Mr. Sloane, with its intimations of homosexuality, bisexuality, loose housewives, and murder, gave the office fits. Within a few years came the deluge:

* A Patriot for Me (1966), by John Osborne, featured a drag ball.
* Saved (1965), by Edward Bond, included a scene of a baby being stoned in a pram.
* Early Morning (April 1968), again by Bond (what was with this guy, anyway?) contained a (fictitious) lesbian love scene between Florence Nightingale and Queen Victoria.

By this time, The Lord Chamberlain was ready to throw in the towel, as a new Theatre Act went into effect on September 26, 1968—just in time for Hair, with its much-hyped nudity, to come over from America. (This, of course, was before London began to export musicals—including those by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber—to the nation that invented the musical comedy genre.)

For an interesting interview on the creation of Hair and its reception in the U.S. prior to its London premiere, I invite you to listen to Leonard Lopate’s WNYC-FM interview with Galt McDermot.