Journalist Merle Frimark, a longtime friend, said the cause of his death at the hospital was cardiopulmonary arrest. So much of “Hair”‘s power lay in its seemingly raw spontaneity, yet Mr. Rando worked for years with his partner Gerome Ragni to perfect this result. Contrary to the theatrical tradition, he and Mr. Ragni were not jobless actors who wrote “Hair” to create roles they could play themselves, but spectators on the New York stage with growing biographies. They met as cast members in an Off Broadway review entitled “Hang Down Your Head and Die”, a London-based show that closed after a show in October 1964. Mr Rado became attached to Mr Ragni and soon he was talking about collaborating on a musical that would immortalize the lavish, increasingly replaced youth culture that rises around them in the streets of Lower Manhattan – a hippie musical before hippies got their name. A musician before becoming an actor, Mr. Rando began writing songs with Mr. Ragni, which were sometimes sung at the then Beatnik Cafes in Greenwich Village. Moving to an apartment in Hoboken, NJ, where rents were even cheaper than in downtown Manhattan, they borrowed a typewriter from their landlord and went to work writing their musical seriously, translating the sexual release into a song. racial integration, pharmacological experimentation and contrast. in the escalating Vietnam War galvanizing their young archetypes on the streets. (They would later recruit Galt MacDermot to write new melodies for their lyrics.) In solidarity, Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni also began letting their short hair grow long. A walk in the museum in mid-1965 brought them face to face with a painting with a tuft of hair by pop artist Jim Dine. Its title was “Hair”. “I brought it to Jerry’s attention and we were both knocked out,” Rando later recalled. Their budding musical now had a name. What happened next would become the material of the Broadway legend, albeit in games and beginnings. In October 1966, at a train station in New Haven, Mr. Ragnie recognized Joseph Pope, an impresse of the then-New York Shakespeare Festival, and handed him a handwritten version of “Hair.” Mr. Papp picked it up, read it, and decided to consider “Hair” making its inaugural production at its Public Theater, which was just nearing completion at the old Astor Library on Lafayette Street in the East Village. Mr. Rando and Mr. Ragni, meanwhile, had begun a search for a legitimate composer to improve the songs. This quest gave Canadian-born MacDermot a very unlikely choice: It was a slightly larger and straighter arrow, with an eclectic musical background but little Broadway experience. Mr. MacDermot wrote the melody for the releases of “Aquarius” and many other songs, according to specifications, in less than 36 hours. It immediately became clear that he was the ideal choice to adjust the lyrical thoughts of Mr. Rando and Mr. Ragni to rock music. A demonstration soon followed in Mr Papp’s office, with Mr MacDermot singing and playing the new songs of the Trinity. Impressed, Mr. Papp announced that he would open Public with “Hair”. However, guessing at himself, he soon canceled his offer, only to reconsider it after a return office hearing, this time with Mr Rando and Mr Ragni singing. In fact, “Hair” opened the Public Theater on October 17, 1967, with 32-year-old Ragni leading the cast as George Berger – the official leader of the hippie tribe – but without the 35-year-old Mr. Rando, who was considered great by the series’ director, Gerald Friedman, to play the doomed protagonist, Claude Hooper Bukowski, although the character relied almost entirely on Mr. Rando himself. “Hair” ran for eight weeks at Public’s brand new Anspacher Theater, creating mouth-to-mouth and ecstatic reviews ranging from confusing to appreciative. A wealthy young Midwesterner with political ambitions and strong anti-war policies named Michael Butler intervened to transport it, first to Cheetah, a nightclub on West 53rd Street, and then – rewritten by Rando and his colleagues. and with a visionary young director. , Tom O’Horgan, now in charge – for Broadway, where Mr. Rado was reinstated in the cast as Claude. A complete obituary will be published soon.
