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 São 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."