The Very First Nudie MusicalBy Peter Landau

Oh! Calcutta! (Picture: 1) deserves the double exclamation marks. It could use a few more and that still wouldn't evoke the play's impact on American society. It may seem tame nowadays, but then the sight of a fully nude cast on Broadway was not only arousing, it was revolutionary.

First performed in an old Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which had previously been a burlesque house, Oh! Calcutta! premiered in 1969. "A year that was delightful for sexual peace," remembers Hillard Elkins, the show's producer. He adds with pride that it was "the first time a production anyplace in the world, besides from National Geographic, had full-frontal nudity."

In 1971 the play was broadcast on pay-for-view, and a copy of that original videotape has been released by New Video Group, complete with a reproduction of the original 1971 Playbill.

What is most surprising about the show is not the nudity or the dated fashions, but actor Bill Macy, better known as the husband on the classic TV sitcom Maude, thrusting his limp member at the audience during the opening number.

"He was an out-of-work actor, a cab driver," says Elkins. He looks like he's enjoying the breast gropes of the naked cuties on stage a lot more than taking a fare across town. He was forty-five years old at the time but looks like a kid in a candy store. One sweet he even married, his co-star Samantha Harper (Picture: 1 - 2), a buxom brunette.

The play is a sex revue, complete with a live rock band, dance pieces, and comedy skits written by John Lennon, Samuel Beckett, Sam Shepard, and Jules Feiffer. Lennon's bit involved Macy and three other masturbators. Their sexual fantasies are broadcast on a large screen as they race to come, but just before climaxing Macy conjures the image of the Lone Ranger, complete with the cavalry charge from "The William Tell Overture."

"John spent a lot of time at [show creator/critic] Kenneth Tynan's house, with all of us, smoking pot and getting relaxed," says Elkins. "As a matter of fact, I had to rewrite John's piece because he had Custer's Last Stand. That didn't work, so I did the Lone Ranger thing."

The show eventually moved to Broadway, where it played for nearly twenty years, as well as twelve years in London and nine years in Paris. "It played all over the world, except for the Eastern Bloc, which we're working on," jokes Elkins. "I'd love to see this done in Johannesburg, South Africa, with a mixed black-and-white company."

But Elkins initially feared Oh! Calcutta! was doomed after opening-night notice came in. "It was called garbage and junk, but sexual garbage and sexual junk, and that word in a review sells tickets," he notes.

"It was supposed to be corny," Elkins says, defending the play. "The doctor's piece and the masturbatory piece were designed to be corny sex scenes. They weren't designed to be marvelous pieces of Shakespearean works that have some sexual overtones."

Angered by the critics' reactions, Elkins more than doubled the price of a ticket to $25. "If I'm going to get shot I might as well go out with a bang," Elkins says. "The next couple of nights we were standing in front of the theater and we watched the limos come up and the crowds coming in and the sell-out occurring. We were both stunned and delighted, and in a week we knew we had what could easily be termed a hit."

That success rests on the naked backs of the actors, especially those actresses that let their hairy freak flags fly. Besides Samantha Harper, Raina Barrett (Picture: 1 - 2), Patricia Hawkins (Picture: 1 - 2), Margo Sappington (Picture: 1 - 2), and Nancy Tribush (Picture: 1 - 2) left nothing to the imagination. But was it hard to get these serious dramatists to show some serious skin?

Elkins says that director Jacques Levy was also a psychologist, which was enormously helpful. "When we set the cast, what Jacques did was give them terrycloth robes, and they put all of their other clothes into storage," Elkins explains. "They worked with those robes, and those robes, as you probably know, tend to untie themselves. The first couple of days there was a lot of robe tying, but on the third day, less robe tying, and by the fourth day they were so delighted that they could work freely without being self-conscious the robes came off."

Elkins is currently working on developing a movie version of Cat's Cradle, the Kurt Vonnegut novel he bought the rights to thirty years ago, and a biopic on LSD guru Timothy Leary, but he still looks back fondly at Oh! Caclutta!

"It is what it is designed to be," he says, looking over the sea of time at the new DVD release. That may be, but would Elkins put his money where his mouth is--or, in this case, more appropriately, where his penis is? "Get naked on stage? Perhaps at that time I would. Now, I think I'm past the mark," admits the seventy-six-year-old producer.

He remembers that in those wild days of free expression there was but one rule in their production of the most notorious show ever staged. "Jacques Levy and I decided that no one would have sex with anyone else in the show. I think we're the only two who stuck to it," he laughs.

Since the show demystifies sex, it's only fitting to reveal the etymology of its title. Oh! Calcutta! is a play on the pun by Surrealist painter Clovis Trouille, "O quel cul t'as!" It's French for "What an ass you have!" And what an ass it is.




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