Every sketch, every dance, every moment dragged on and on far longer than it needed to. Actual pornography is less repetitious and better at getting to the point. There’s also a distasteful aspect that comes from how the POV is 100% straight male, just steeped in opinions about women that haven’t aged at all well (non-straight people don’t exist in the world of this show, of course).

Not very long after Oh, Calcutta, there was an off-broadway show called Let My People Come, and it was everything this show was not. Funny, sexy, insightful, open to different perspectives…the show even had a brief revival a decade or so back and was still sharp. Try playing Oh, Calcutta again and you’ll have 2-3 hours of appalled silence.

Thanks for this upload, Jon. I have fond memories of seeing the Broadway play on a theatre marquee when I lived in NYC,from the mid 1970s to the mid 80s, though I didn’t see the stage show, or the film. I recall that the musical, or play, ran a long time, and I think it was still running in 1978 or 79.

Oh! Calcutta! was part of series of musicals, about free love and spirituality, starting in 1968 with HAIR, the Tribal Rock musical, (the actress Diane Keaton was in the chorus) by James Redo IIRC. Followed by musicals about Jesus from Andrew Lloyd Weber’s pen, Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971, which was made into a film with an inspiring soundtrack. Like West Side Story from Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein, debuting in 1957 and made into a film in 1962, with a recent film revival in 2021, by Steven Spielberg, shortly before Sondheim’s death, all part of the countercultural wave of such Broadway shows. Including Godspell, which had no author but was based on The Book of St John, in the bible.

I also remember when ALW produced Evita in 1979 starring Patty LePone, who revived the role last year with Covid-19 restrictions for the audience. Madonna recreated the role in the 2000s and won a Golden Globe for playing Eva Peron..

BTW, when I visited Russia in 1990, some people I met in Moscow, who put me up, had a reel to reel recording of JC Superstar that was smuggled into the country and copied by them. The original cast recording. Amazing when you think of it. Until the mid-90s there was no state religion or private religious practices allowed under the Soviet system and atheism was the official religion.. Though because of Gorbechev’s Perestroika, religion was making a comeback in the late 1980s. Churches were being re-opened and created. That later wave was under Boris Yeltsin.. By the time of Putin, religion was back in full swing, and when Putin canonised the Romanovs as saints, who were murdered in 1917 by the Bolsheviks, the circle was closed.

Well, Gabriel, you are on a discussion site about Oh! Calcutta!. So, and I know this post is nearly 2 years old, watch it?

It’s working for me, Gabriel, why you say it’s not available?