About HAIR
Book & Lyrics by Gerome Ragni & James Radio
Music by Galt McDermot
Music Direction by Andrew Smithson
Hair is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Tams-Witmark LLC. www.concordtheatricals.com
TIME
Here and Now/There and Then
SETTING
OU Baker Theatre 2026/ Vietnam, NYC, 1960’s
DATES
February 26 - 28 @ 8pm, 2/28 @ 2pm, and March 4 - 6 @ 8pm March 7 at 2pm only. The Elizabeth Evans Baker Theater in Kantner Hall, 19 South College Street, Athens OH 45701
There are talk-backs after the shows on Saturday 2/28 after the 2pm performance and Wednesday March 4 after the 8pm performance.
Running time is 2.5 hours with one 10-minute intermission
TICKETS
Free student rush tickets for Ohio University students with a valid OU ID will be available at the venue for every performance provided the performance is not sold out.
SYNOPSIS
Hair tells the story of the "tribe", a group of politically active, long-haired hippies of the "Age of Aquarius" living a bohemian life in New York City and fighting against conscription into the Vietnam War.
CONTENT WARNING
HAIR includes haze, strobe effects, mature language and themes, brief nudity, references to drug use, and portrayals of war and racial and political protest. The content reflects the era in which the musical was created and may not be suitable for all audiences.
ANY TYPE OF RECORDING IS PROHIBITED DURING THIS PRODUCTION
Patrons expressly acknowledge that audio recording, video recording, photography, livestreaming, or capture of any kind is strictly prohibited during the performance, whether by phone, camera, wearable device, or any other means. Any patron found using a cell phone or other recording device during the performance will be removed immediately from the theatre, will not be permitted to re-enter, and will not receive a refund or exchange. Any unauthorized recordings must be deleted immediately at the direction of the House Manager. These conditions are non-negotiable and are enforced to protect the artists, the audience, and the integrity of the live performance.
MUSICAL NUMBERS
ACT I
"Aquarius” ………. Dionne & Tribe
“Donna” ………. Berger & Tribe
“Hashish” ………. Tribe
“Sodomy” ………. Woof & Tribe
“Colored Spade” ………. Hud & Tribe
“Manchester, England” ………. Claude & Tribe
“I'm Back” ………. Hud, Woof, Berger, Claude & Tribe
“Ain't Got No” ………. Woof, Hud, Dionne & Tribe
“Dead End” ………. Dionne & Trio
“I Believe In Love” ………. Sheila & Trio
“Ain't Got No Grass” ………. Tribe
“Air” ………. Jeanie with Dionne & Crissy
“Initials” ………. Tribe
“1930s” ………. Berger
“Manchester II” ………. Claude & Tribe
“I Got Life” ………. Claude & Tribe
“Going Down” ………. Berger & Tribe
“Hair” ………. Claude, Berger & Tribe
“My Conviction” ………. Margaret Meade
“Sheila Franklin” ………. Tribe
“Easy To Be Hard” ………. Sheila
Don't Put It Down” ………. Woof & Berger
“Frank Mills” ………. Crissy
“Be-In Hare Krishna” ………. Tribe
“Where Do I Go” ………. Claude & Tribe
ACT II
"Electric Blues" ………. Quartet
"Oh Great God Of Power" ………. Tribe
"Manchester III" ………. Tribe
"Black Boys" ………. White Girls Trio & Black Boys
"White Boys" ………. "The Supreme Trio", White Girls Trio & Tribe
"Walking In Space" ………. Tribe
"Abie, Baby" ………. Hud & Tribe
"The War" ………. 1,000-Year-Old Monk, 3 Monks, 3 Nuns & Tribe
"Three-Five-Zero-Zero" ………. Tribe
"What A Piece Of Work Is Man" ………. Tribe
"How Dare They Try" ………. Tribe
"Good Morning Starshine" ………. Sheila & Tribe
"The Bed/Aquarius Goodnights" ………. Tribe
"Reprise: Ain't Got No" ………. Claude & Tribe
"The Flesh Failures" ………. Claude
"Eyes, Look Your Last" ………. Claude & Tribe
"Let The Sun Shine In" ………. Tribe
ORCHESTRA
Conductor/Keyboard, Music Director: Andrew Smithson
Guitars: Landon Elliott, Andrew Krag
Bass: Marcis Bravo
Drums: Casey Morarity
Percussion: Kaylei Paugh
Reeds: Emily Talley
Trumpets: Mark Humbert, Carver Whitson
DRAMATURGICAL NOTES
Three-Five-Zero-Zero
Three-Five-Zero-Zero: These four numerals are repeated repeatedly, and mysteriously, toward the end of HAIR. I have heard them many times on the old LP I inherited (or perhaps stole) from my parents, but I never tried to understand what they mean. In many ways, it turns out, “Three-Five-Zero-Zero” provide keys for understanding this American Tribal Love Rock Musical.
They come from the poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” written by Allen Ginsberg in 1966. Ginsberg was a poet born in 1926, two decades before the post-World-War II baby boomers. You may know Ginsberg, as I did, for his “Howl” (1954-55), a poetic shout, obscene in parts, against post-war American conformity and its destruction of individuals, or, as Ginsberg puts it in the poem: “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” Ginsberg was a Buddhist who traveled to India in the 1950s and befriended in the 1960s the founder in America of the Hare Krishna movement. Buddhism and Hare Krishna could open minds and change souls, as could, for Ginsberg, the holy human body, in sex and in mind bending experiments with psychedelics—another friend of Ginsberg’s was Timothy Leary, the psychologist and advocate for LSD.
Ginsberg’s ideas flowered in the baby boomers—especially the hippies, given that name around 1960, who were grasping at peace and love. The two writers of HAIR, James Rado, who also originated the role of Claude, and Gerome Ragni, who originated Berger, were born in the mid-30s, and were inspired by the slightly younger hippies they met on the streets of New York. Rado and Ragni encountered “Wichita Vortex Sutra” as they were developing HAIR toward Broadway, where it premiered in 1968.
“Wichita Vortex Sutra,” written in protest of the Vietnam War, is a furious poem, laced with acid anger. In 1964, following the Bay of Tonkin incident, the U.S. began openly using conventional military force against Vietnam, and by 1966 the U.S. had horrifyingly escalated the war. Many young men, like Claude in HAIR, were forcibly conscripted, their bodies organized by draft cards and seized by the government. “American Eagle beating its wings over Asia,” Ginsberg writes, “million dollar helicopters / a billion dollars worth of Marines / who loved Aunt Betty.”
Ragni and Rado borrowed extensively from “Wichita Vortex Sutra” in their song “Three-Five-Zero-Zero.” Their use of Ginsberg’s words is, like the poem itself, deliberately ambiguous, disturbingly strange, nightmarish. If you read the poem, and I encourage you to find it, online or published in Planet News, you will find multiple instances of the numerals: “Viet Cong losses leveling up three five zero zero / per month / Front page testimony February ’66.” And again later: “Napalm and black clouds emerging in newsprint / Flesh soft as a Kansas girl’s / ripped open by metal explosion— / three five zero zero.” In other words, the U.S. military, surreally refracted by Ginsberg, is bragging about killing each month three-thousand-five-hundred Vietnamese.
HAIR is not as dark as the darkest parts of “Wichita Vortex Sutra”—these young people, a whole haggle of hippies, celebrate, as the older Ginsberg did, their bodies, their opening minds and changing souls, the tribe they are making for themselves. They are pulled and pushed, like the narrator in Ginsberg’s poem, between the reality of the dirty war and their own holy birthright, which declares war ended. “It’s not a God that bore us that forbid / our being, like a sunny rose / all red with naked joy,” Ginsberg writes. “How dare they try to end this beauty?,” Ragni and Rado respond.
-Matt Cornish
Dramaturg, HAIR, 2026
Lost in the Folds of the Flag
In the 1965 debate between William F. Buckley Jr. and James Baldwin over whether the American dream is realized at the cost of the American Negro, Baldwin famously stated: “It comes as a great shock around the age of five, or six, or seven, to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.” It stands to reason that HAIR cannot reclaim the American dream, but instead must recognize the racial inequities we see both in Baldwin’s address and the experiences of the musical’s Tribe. “Oh, I’m lost in the folds of the flag,” Woof laments, “Oh, I’m falling through a hole in the flag.”
I’ve been feeling lost in the folds of the flag myself. In a year with a political climate nearly as charged, if not more so, as 1968, when HAIR premiered on Broadway, letting the sun shine in is impossible at times. We can be inspired by the Tribe’s insistence on including America’s outcasts: draft dodgers, people of color, and a myriad of sexualities and genders. They observe and attempt to exercise the practices of Hindu and Native American cultures. At their best, they model exactly what Margaret Mead tells them: “I wish every mom and dad would make a speech to their teenagers and say ‘Kids, be free. Be whoever you are, do whatever you want to do, just so long as you don’t hurt anybody.’” But sometimes they get lost, or lose themselves, and not just in the folds of the flag.
As the Tribe members find their way through the world of HAIR, they begin to realize that young Americans cannot stop at achieving basic freedom. Baldwin concludes his speech by telling his audience: “I am one of the people who built this country.” If he, and people like him, “are denied participation in” the American dream, “by their very presence they will wreck it.” America, by its very nature, will destroy itself if there are people who are not allowed its dream. We must ask ourselves, then: How do we make our flag worthy of everyone who has sacrificed for America–for everyone who has been sacrificed by America? What can we do now?
As radical as HAIR was when it premiered on Broadway, it can still serve today as a reminder that change is not going to enact itself. Even as we hum along to “Aquarius,” it reminds us: only pledge allegiance to a flag that pledges its allegiance to all of us. We must attend peaceful protests, vote, and engage with the nuances of other cultures. We must fight for the future of America so that it lives on to fight for us. We must do these things whether we are destined for greatness, or madness.
-Carmen Foster
Assistant Dramaturg, HAIR, 2026
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Tantrum Theater, acknowledges that we perform on traditional homelands of the Shawnee people, as well as the Wahzhazhe (who are also known as the Osage).
Tantrum Theater
A Season of Reckoning and Rebellion
Welcome to the final show of Tantrum's 10th anniversary season!
In the fall, we kicked off this season with Inherit the Wind , Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's dramatization of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. More a play about science and religion, it invited us to reflect on the act of thinking itself—on the courage it takes to question, to speak, to dissent. Though written in the shadow of McCarthyism, the play felt remarkably fresh and startlingly relevant to our audiences. As public discourse grows increasingly polarized and even the right to ask difficult questions can feel uncertain, the story resonated with particular urgency. As we celebrate a decade of bold storytelling, it served as a powerful reminder that progress is rarely linear—and that while history may not repeat itself exactly, it echoes, revealing the lessons we are still struggling to learn.
Now comes HAIR—a revolution in theatrical form and spirit. Born out of the counterculture of the 1960s, this musical gave voice to a generation refusing to accept the world as it was. It is messy, loud, passionate, and profoundly human. Beneath its wild surface is a plea for peace, love, and liberation. It is a demand for change that still resonates with stunning clarity today. As we face our own cultural reckonings around war, identity, bodily autonomy, climate, and justice, HAIR affirms for us that protest can also be joyful—and that community and connection are powerful forms of resistance.
At first glance, these two plays couldn't seem more different--one a courtroom drama steeped in historical allegory, the other an explosion of rock, rebellion and youth. And yet, both ask the same urgent question: What are we willing to stand for? Together, these works confront American unrest and awakening. They expose difficult truths we often prefer to avoid and challenge us to live authentically within systems that demand conformity.
We are proud to share these stories with you, not as museum pieces, but as living, breathing conversations. We hope they spark your curiosity and dare you to engage in challenging conversations to move our democracy and our humanity forward.
Welcome to our season!
Ellie Clark, Artistic Director
Rachel Cornish, Interim Producing Director
FOR YOUR INFORMATION
Tantrum Theater is proud to have the support from the following sponsors, without whose support, this performance would not have been possible: The National Endowment for the Arts , The Ohio Arts Council, Ohio Humanities, College of Fine Arts Community Fund
HOW TO REACH US
Tantrum Theater
19 South College Street
1 Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701
740.593.4818
Email: [email protected]
FIRE NOTICE
Illuminated signs above each door indicate
emergency exits. Please check for the nearest
exit. In the event of an emergency, you will be
notified by theater personnel and assisted in
the evacuation of the building.
SEATING POLICY
Everyone must have a ticket. Sorry, no
children in arms or on laps. Patrons who
leave the theater during the performance
will be reseated at the discretion of house
management. Those who become disruptive
will be asked to leave the theater.
ACCESSIBILITY SERVICES
The Elizabeth Evans Baker Theater is fully accessible to those with mobility issues.
When booking tickets, please let our Box
Office know if you require a ticket that will
accommodate a wheelchair. Please call Ledger
Free, Director of Audience Services, at 917-
733-0081 if you need any assistance during
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