[6] That same year, Ragni made his first Off-Broadway appearance in New York City in the anti-capital punishment musical Hang Down Your Head and Die at the Mayfair Theatre on October 18 with James Rado, a fellow actor and friend who was studying with Lee Strasberg.
"[9] In 1965, Ragni performed in the role of Tom in The Knack, the play that opened at the New Theatre, and later appeared in the touring company along with Rado.
During the show's Chicago run at the Harper Theater, Rado and Ragni tried to revive Hang Down Your Head and Die with what they could remember from the script.
They also planned to introduce new material in collaboration with Corky Siegel and Jim Schwall, of the Siegel-Schwall Band, whom they met playing in a beatnik coffee house off the Harper Street strip.
They spent time writing ideas for the production, which was to be performed by Rado, Ragni, Schwall, and Siegel in a house on the South Side of Chicago and an apartment on Stony Island Avenue.
After two weeks of working on the production, The Knack company went back to New York and Ragni and Rado had to abandon their plans to revive Hang Down Your Head and Die with Siegel and Schwall.
[10] Viet Rock and experimental theatre inspired Ragni to work with Rado on a musical about hippie culture.
Joseph Papp, of the New York Shakespeare Festival, called to say he wanted to produce it at his new theatre on Lafayette Street.
On October 29, 1967, Hair opened at The Public Theater with Ragni as Berger, MacDermot as a cop who busts the show at the end of the first act, and Rado as Claude.
He bought the rights from Papp for $50,000 and began planning a grander production directed by Tom O'Horgan, who Ragni knew from off-Broadway.
According to The New York Times, "[a]t the first run through, the stage, filled with two tons of top soil, filthied the actors and dumped dirt on everybody sitting in the first ten rows.
"[14] The 2,000 pages were cut down to 200, a second act was written, more songs were added, and although in a constant state of change and plagued with backstage problems the show opened at The Broadway Theatre in October 1972.
Before the opening, MacDermot's label Kilmarnock Records released an album of songs from the show sung by Salome Bey.
[15] In 1977 Ragni and Rado collaborated with Steve Margoshes on a new show called Jack Sound and His Dog Star Blowing His Final Trumpet on the Day of Doom, produced off-Broadway by the Ensemble Studio Theatre.
It played a short run alongside an ill-fated Broadway revival of Hair that ran for forty-three performances and starred Ragni and Rado as the bogus cops who bust the show.
[18] Sun had been in development since the mid-1970s and an early version was staged for backers in 1976, directed by John Vaccaro of Theatre of the Ridiculous fame, with appearances by Ruby Lynn Reyner, Annie-Joe Edwards and Ellen Foley.
Rado told New York Magazine that "YMCA will do to the seventies what Hair did to the sixties," but the 1976 version never made it past rehearsals.