Hair has been the most successful music drama of the decade, if not of the entire postwar era…. [It] has been exalted as a paean to the health and vitality of today's youth, denounced as an open slander of time-tested ideals, dismissed as a commercial exploitation. Whatever one's opinions as to its worth, nobody can deny its success. (p. 9)

Hair has been widely hailed as the salvation of the Broadway musical, which has been dying an inexorable death from massive public indifference to arm-cranking chorines purveying plastic joy. But if this is so, then Hair and the phenomenon it represents must also be of great interest to opera-lovers, particularly those concerned with the unpleasant fact that a genuinely popular grand opera hasn't been written in forty-five years—not since Turandot. Somehow, somewhere back there along the line, audiences and composers parted ways; and ever since, people have been...