James Rado - Post Hair

Post Hair

After the success of Hair, Rado and Ragni went their separate ways for a period of time in the early Seventies. While Ragni and Hair composer Galt MacDermot collaborated on Dude, Rado wrote a musical entitled The Rainbow Rainbeam Radio Roadshow, or Rainbow for short, collaborating on the book with his brother Ted Rado and contributing his own music and lyrics. Rainbow opened Off-Broadway at the Orpheum Theater in December 1972. The musical is a sequel of sorts to Hair with a character called Man who was killed in the Vietnam War and who now lives in Rainbow land. Clive Barnes gave it a positive review in The New York Times, writing " is joyous and life-assertive. It is the first musical to derive from Hair that really seems to have the confidence of a new creation about it, largely derived from James Rado's sweet and fresh music and lyrics." Since then, Rainbow has been revised numerous times, in some developments becoming more explicitly a sequel to Hair, as when it became Rainbow: The Ghost of Vietnam in the late Nineties, and in others becoming more abstract as in its newest version, initially titled Billy Earth: The New Rainbow and now known as American Soldier: The White Haunted House.

In 1974, Rado reunited with Ragni to co-write Sun: An Audio Movie, a show with music by Steve Margoshes based on a play by New York writer Joyce Greller with themes about pollution and the environment. The musical (then titled YMCA) was initially staged for backers in 1976, in a workshop directed by John Vaccaro, with appearances by Ruby Lynn Reyner and Annie-Joe Edwards. Rado and Ragni would later write another musical together, again with Margoshes, entitled Jack Sound and His Dog Star Blowing His Final Trumpet on the Day of Doom. The show ran at La MaMa in the summer of 1978.