James Rado

James Rado, born James Alexander Radomski on January 23, 1932, in Los Angeles, was an American actor, playwright, composer, and director best known as the co-author of the 1967 musical Hair. He was raised in Irondequoit, New York, and Washington, D.C., and went on to become one of the defining creative voices of the American musical theater counterculture. He died on June 21, 2022, at a Manhattan hospital from cardiorespiratory arrest at the age of 90.

Rado studied Speech and Drama in college, during which time he co-authored two musical productions at the University of Maryland, Interlude and Interlude II, writing both the lyrics and music himself. After graduating and completing two years of service in the U.S. Navy, he pursued graduate work at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he co-authored a musical revue titled Cross Your Fingers. He subsequently relocated to New York City, where he studied acting under Lee Strasberg and recorded pop songs with his own band, James Alexander and the Argyles.

His Broadway career began in 1963 with Marathon '33, and over the following years he appeared in Luther and Generation before taking on the role of Richard Lionheart in the original Broadway production of The Lion in Winter in 1966, a play by James Goldman that starred Robert Preston and Rosemary Harris. It was during this period of stage work that Rado met Gerome Ragni in 1964, when the two acted together in the off-Broadway production Hang Down Your Head and Die. They were subsequently both cast in the Chicago company of Mike Nichols' production of The Knack by Ann Jellicoe, playing Tom and Tolan respectively.

Rado and Ragni began writing Hair together in late 1964. The two spent time among the hippie communities of New York, attending Be-Ins and immersing themselves in the cultural upheaval of the era as source material for the show. Hair premiered off-Broadway in October 1967 and transferred to Broadway in April 1968, where it ran for 1,750 performances. The production generated numerous international stagings, a 1979 film adaptation, and multiple Top 10 hit songs drawn from its score. The 2009 Broadway revival received the Tony Award for Best Revival and also opened in London's West End. For the original production, Rado and Ragni received a nomination for the 1969 Tony Award for Best Musical and won the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album at the 11th Annual Grammy Awards.

Although Rado did not play the lead role of Claude when Hair first ran off-Broadway, he originated the part on Broadway, performing opposite Ragni as Berger. He later reprised the role in the Los Angeles production. The characters of Claude and Berger were autobiographical to a degree, with Claude representing what Rado described as the pensive romantic. In a 2008 interview with The Advocate, Rado publicly described himself as omnisexual and spoke openly about his romantic relationship with Ragni.

Following the success of Hair, the two collaborators worked separately for a period in the early 1970s. Rado wrote a musical called The Rainbow Rainbeam Radio Roadshow, known as Rainbow, collaborating on the book with his brother Ted Rado and contributing his own music and lyrics. The show opened off-Broadway at the Orpheum Theater in December 1972 and functioned as a sequel of sorts to Hair, centering on a character killed in the Vietnam War who inhabits a place called Rainbow land. The production received a positive review from Clive Barnes in The New York Times. Rainbow was subsequently revised numerous times over the following decades, appearing in versions titled Rainbow: The Ghost of Vietnam, Billy Earth: The New Rainbow, American Soldier: The White Haunted House, and ultimately Supersoldier, which received a staged reading on October 14, 2013, at the Manhattan Movement and Arts Center through the Fundamental Theater Project and the New York Theatre Barn.

In 1974, Rado and Ragni reunited to co-write Sun, a show with music by Steve Margoshes based on a play by Joyce Greller dealing with themes of pollution and the environment. The musical was initially staged for backers in 1976 in a workshop directed by John Vaccaro and was presented at the Howl! Arts Project in 2011. A separate version of Sun, featuring a score by Hair composer Galt MacDermot, was presented in concert form in 1998. Rado and Ragni later collaborated again with Margoshes on Jack Sound and His Dog Star Blowing His Final Trumpet on the Day of Doom, which ran at La MaMa in the summer of 1978.

Following Ragni's death in 1991, Rado remained active in developing new productions of Hair, directing an eleven-city national tour in 1994 and overseeing the 2006 CanStage production in Toronto. Beginning in 2011, he served as creative consultant for the rock musical Barcode, which premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival in August 2013. On December 3, 2011, he performed songs from Barcode at Occupy Wall Street's Occupy Broadway event.