Still Taking It Off and Taking It In

By Gerald Clarke

Think for a minute of some of the things that have happened since June 17, 1969, when Oh! Calcutta! opened to almost universal boos from the critics: the first moon landing, Watergate, gas shortages and surpluses, the breakup of the Beatles and AT&T, the demise of miniskirts, the birth and death of the yuppie, Rocky I, II, III and IV. A changing world, you might say, and shake your graying head. But calm down. There is some stability. In Manhattan and Sao Paulo, audiences are still paying to see Oh! Calcutta! and watch eight actors and actresses take it off--take it all off.

"The world's longest-running erotic stage musical," as it is now billed, has changed little since those Pleistocene days, and today's critics would probably make the same judgments as their predecessors. "With all my heart, I recommend staying away from the slick and repulsive come-on called Oh! Calcutta!, "wrote Brendan Gill of The New Yorker. "Voyeurs of the city unite, you have nothing to lose but your brains," added Clive Barnes in the New York Times. "Far from being a sexual stimulant, Oh! Calcutta! is an anaphrodisiac," declared TIME's T.E. Kalem.

But audiences, who sometimes show an ornery independence from critics, apparently disagreed. In nearly 17 years, the show has been performed more than 15,000 times in 15 countries, and it has titillated, shocked and outraged roughly 86 million people. "There is always some reaction to Oh! Calcutta!," says Norman Kean, its producer and promoter. "Its message is theatricality--outrageous theatricality--which goes beyond the twilight zone into a territory that had never been explored onstage before."

That territory was, of course, sex. Except for Hair (1967), which caused gasps with its blink-of-the-eye moment of frontal nudity, naked bodies--really naked bodies--had never before been seen on a respectable stage. Oh! Calcutta! thus made history of a kind when after a striptease with bathrobes, the entire cast threw off the veil of terry cloth and lined up across the stage, protected by nothing but smiles and goose pimples. "It was a staggeringly inventive piece of theater at the time," says one of its twelve writers, Director Robert Benton (Places in the Heart). "It was truly shocking and erotic." (Some of the other writers: John Lennon, Sam Shepard and Jules Feiffer.)

Shocking and erotic were perhaps the two words dearest to the heart of Kenneth Tynan, the late English critic who conceived the idea for the show. "He said that we could write about anything in the world within the realm of sexuality," says Benton's Calcutta partner, David Newman. "The only other caveat he had was that our piece should have absolutely no redeeming social value."

By 1972 theatergoers in New York City, at least, were beyond shock, and Oh! Calcutta! closed. Four years later Keanrevived it, sensing a whole new audience in the tourists flocking to the city for the bicentennial. Through good years and bad, the show has been running ever since at Broadway's Edison Theater, drawing strongly, Kean says, from the West Coast and the Midwest. Audiences are still often nervous at the beginning. New actors, on the other hand, are so busy learning routines that the fact they are standing naked occurs to them only weeks after they start. "Suddenly I realized, 'Oh, my God, I'm out here nude!'" recalls Cheryl Hartley, who has been with the show since 1977. But eventually nudity becomes a costume, just like any other.

About a third of those who now see the show are Asian, mostly Japanese, who are not allowed such fleshly delights in their own country. Frontal nudity is forbidden on Japanese stages, and the pubic regions of Playboy centerfolds are covered with ink before they are allowed on news stands. "The sex drive is international; so is human curiosity," says Sherman Yellen, another of Calcutta's twelve happy writers, each of whom still gets approximately $7,000 a year in royalties.

Capitalizing on Oriental interest in the all-too-unmysterious Occident, Kean advertises in Japan and in places that Japanese tourists frequent in New York City; he has even raised a bilingual billboard on Broadway. This month he will begin renting earphones for a simultaneous Japanese translation. Besides the body language, which has an international accent, there are real words in Oh! Calcutta!, some of them fairly amusing. In fact, five of the 13 segments display no nudity at all.

There are places besides Japan where the production is still banned, including, astonishingly enough, Las Vegas. But Kean broke the barrier of traditional Latin prudery, and native companies have done well in Caracas, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Last month he breached another wall. Reversing an earlier decision, Israel's board of censorship agreed that the show can play in Tel Aviv, beginning in late March. Oh! Calcutta!, which has already made $360 million, will go on and probably make another $360 million. The children of the original audiences are now coming to see it, and their children doubt less will too. Michael Clarke, a member of the current Broadway cast, was all of seven on opening night in 1969 and expects the show to be around when he is 70. "As long as there is sex," he predicts, "there will be Oh! Calcutta!" --By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Jeanne McDowell/New York

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/New York