by Laurence Maslon
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| The Beatles, and the creators of "Hair," Gerome Ragni and James Rado. |
For the first 50 years of its existence, the music of Broadway was the music of America, but beginning in 1954, a schism grew between Broadway and commercially popular music. That year, Bill Haley and the Comets released a single for Decca called "Rock Around the Clock," with a heavy backbeat and an electric guitar solo. When it was used to represent disaffected youth in the soundtrack for THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE, the song became the anthem for an era, selling two million copies by the end of 1955. Rock 'n' roll so dominated the times that, by 1957, every entry in BILLBOARD's Top Ten was a rock song. Rock spoke to youth, it was about youth, and served as the seminal wedge in popular culture to create a divide between parents and children. After the Beatles landed in America in early 1964, the dominance of youth became complete -- their singles soon occupied the top five places on the BILLBOARD charts. (They were temporarily unseated by Louis Armstrong's rendition of "Hello, Dolly!," which, in a brief paroxysm of revolt from the old folks, reclaimed the number-one spot.) What it came down to, by 1967, was that Broadway was "your parents' music," which gave young audiences yet another excuse for ignoring it.
The show that brought rock music to Broadway was born downtown at the eastern fringes of Greenwich Village, at the Public Theatre, which was run by the brazen and mercurial Joseph Papp. A couple of unemployed actors, Gerome Ragni and James Rado, cobbled together a musical script about life among the flower children in New York's East Village. They found a Canadian composer named Galt MacDermot, who had worked in Africa but had never seen a Broadway show. Papp was enthusiastic when MacDermot's eclectic score of hard rock, Motown, hymns, Indian ragas, and ballads was presented to him. Papp had to pick something provocative with which to open his theater in October of 1967; "Hair" seemed a reasonably unreasonable choice.
"Hair" didn't have much of a plot; a young man named Claude, set loose among the "tribe" of young hippies in Washington Square, faces being drafted in the Vietnam War. What was far more compelling was the phantasmagoria that exploded around him. "Hair" was, in many ways, simply a revue, showing practically every aspect of the counterculture in a variety of musical styles, dance, and stage effects. In April 1968, "Hair" took the IRT to Broadway, ensconcing itself at the Biltmore Theater on West 47th Street. The show's nudity was a first for a Broadway musical, as was its full rock score. Both intrigued potential customers, and "The American Tribal Love Rock Musical" -- a subtitle coined as a gag -- settled in for a run of 1,742 performances.
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| "Hair" tribe members, and a detail of the "Promises, Promises" poster. |
The show's rock score pleased critics of the Broadway sound, and soon some of its more accessible songs -- "Aquarius," "Hair," and "Let the Sunshine In" -- made it onto the pop charts (where they were most emphatically not covered by Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney). Eventually, a younger audience started coming to the show, intrigued by the music they found so compelling on the radio or the cast album. Would "Hair" be the musical savior of Broadway, dragging other scores kicking and screaming into the Age of Aquarius?
At the end of 1968, "Hair" found itself competing with a show that might have had an even more profound effect in renovating the sound of Broadway. When Burt Bacharach and Hal David were approached by David Merrick to score the musical version of Billy Wilder's movie THE APARTMENT -- "Promises, Promises" -- they were, next to Lennon and McCartney, the most successful songwriters in pop music. With songs like "Walk on By," "What the World Needs Now Is Love," "The Look of Love," and "This Guy's in Love With You," they had, in many ways, defined the American sound of romance in the 1960s; they were also excellent storytellers. Bacharach loved developing songs out of author Neil Simon's narrative scheme, and he and David were challenged by writing for consistent characters and their emotions. The score itself was biting, tender, and impulsive, and practically shrieked with the sounds of contemporary Manhattan. Bacharach used a completely modern pop sound in the service of a narrative musical comedy.
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| Marvin Hamlisch with Michael Bennett during rehearsals for "A Chorus Line." |
What he didn't love was the lack of control that was part and parcel of the Broadway musical. "It used to drive me crazy," he recalled. "There would be eight [substitute orchestra players], including the drummer. The impermanence of Broadway gets to you because everything shifts from night to night. If you've got a great take on a record, it's there, it's embedded forever." The recording studios provided more comfort -- artistically and financially -- and Bacharach moved back to Palm Springs; to this date, he has not written another Broadway score. In his wake, the "contemporary" rock sound could be found instead in such shows as "Dude," "Via Galactica," "Sgt. Pepper," and "Rockaby Hamlet" --all unsuccessful attempts in the early 1970s to put rock music at the service of a Broadway narrative.
More successful were the hybrid scores that used the backbeat of rock music or some of its electronic instrumentation to juice up a more conventional score. Marvin Hamlisch's score for "A Chorus Line" (1975) used some of these effects, and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice provided rock-tinged music for their British transfers of "Jesus Christ Superstar" (1971) and "Evita" (1979). In the form of the massively successful "pop operas" of the 1980s (several written by Lloyd Webber), accessible pop/rock rhythms supplanted pure rock and, for a while, the more familiar electric guitar riffs appearing on Broadway entranced a younger generation of theatergoers. But when these megahit scores began tapering off in the 1990s, Broadway producers desperately sought out new ways of capturing the Generation X audience.
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photo credits: Photofest, the New York Public Library, and Martha Swope
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Critic Frank Rich talks about the Broadway musical falling out of step with popular culture during the 1960s; Jerry Herman on his song "Hello, Dolly!" topping the pop charts; Ben Vereen describes auditioning and working on "Hair."
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