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Hair, the groundbreaking 1960s "tribal love-rock musical", reopens in London's West End tonight in a revival co-produced by Sir Cameron Mackintosh.
Its controversial London premiere, on Friday 27 September 1968, coincided with the ending of more than two centuries of stage censorship - one of the great cultural watersheds of that most tumultuous of decades.
According to its best-known song, Hair arrived on the scene at the "dawning of the age of Aquarius", a mythical era which would usher in universal peace, love and understanding. The reality could not have been further from the truth.
1967, that fabled "summer of love" which saw The Beatles serenade a live worldwide television audience of 400 million with All You Need Is Love, had morphed into something much darker and visceral.
The "Prague Spring", a blossoming of liberalisation born in Czechoslovakia in January 1968, was crushed by the tanks of Soviet bloc that August.
Elsewhere, students around Europe revolted in May, most notably in Paris. US involvement in Vietnam was by now a full-scale war and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy signified to many the end of a youthful dream.
Throughout all this, though, London's West End sailed on, as stately and unswerveable as an ocean liner. The land of such smash-hit, family-friendly, as My Fair Lady, Salad Days and South Pacific was impervious to the changing times and mores. Or so it seemed. Hair, written by out-of-work actors Gerome Ragni and James Rado, had debuted in New York the previous December.
With scenes containing nudity and drug-taking as well as its strong anti-war message and the desecration of the American flag on stage, few would have expected it to grace London's Shaftesbury Avenue.
And the chances of Hair making a successful West End transfer were lengthened even more by the censorship regime which still existed in Britain.
Since 1737, when prime minister Sir Robert Walpole introduced new rules in order to curb anti-government satires, all plays had to be passed by the Lord Chamberlain before they could be performed in a public theatre.
'Manifestly high-spirited'
But the appearance of Hair coincided with dramatic changes in British society. 1967 had seen two hugely significant pieces of legislation - partially decriminalising homosexual acts between men aged 21 or over and legalizing abortion - reach the statute book.
And, following a decades-long campaign, supported by luminaries including George Bernard Shaw and John Osborne, parliament finally abolished stage censorship.
The Theatres Act, which came into effect the day before Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre, did away with the Lord Chamberlain, who had already banned three prior versions of the musical.
Indeed, one censor had reported that the show "extols dirt, anti-establishment views, homosexuality, free love and inveighs against patriotism".
Although playwrights now had much more latitude, they were still liable to be prosecuted for strong language and obscenity.
The most controversial scene in Hair involved the cast emerging entirely naked from under a vast sheet. Tom O'Horgan, who directed that London production, said: "I think that the famed nude scene has been greatly over-emphasised.
"It has very little importance in the show itself and much of the publicity has obscured the important aspects of the play, which are also perhaps shocking to people because they deal with things as they are. We tell it the way it is." In Britain, as in the United States, Hair opened to mixed reviews.
Drama critic Irving Wardle, writing in The Times, said: "Nothing else remotely like it has yet struck the West End. Its honesty and passion give it the quality of a true theatrical celebration - the joyous sound of a group of people telling the world exactly what they feel."
The Guardian's Philip Hope-Wallace, wrote that the climax of the first act was "a subliminal but quite effective tableau of nudes, frontal female and male.
"I can well imagine some scandalised reactions, but possibly more to the blasphemy (conventional), rude words (the usual), and even perhaps to the general anti-Americanism of what is plotless, but not quite witless and manifestly high spirited, even if in a rather boringly exhibitionist anti-authoritarian manner."
And The Telegraph's critic, the 78 year-old WA Darlington, wrote that he had "tried hard", but found the evening "a complete bore". Others disagreed: the London production ran for 1,997 performances until 1973.This article is from the BBC News website. ? British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.