Oh! Calcutta!

This move is a mostly funny mostly naked satire of sexuality of the times, circa 1970, that still holds up today.The bodies are perfect and most of the gags are right on the money.It was written by some of the best writers of this century and the acting is superb.The dance numbers are some of the most innovative ever choreographed and the people are naked--isn't that what your always wanted to see in a modern dance routine anyway!Be sure to check out the "Sex Clinic" sketch, it will leave you in stitches!

If you're into nostalgia for the 60's and 70's this film of the stage play is a good choice. Like a 60's commune or "house" you will find a make-shift family looking to explore their sexuality safely amongst those they can trust. The actors are naked much of the time and the play is about sex, however it is packaged with statements about choice, freedom, and trust. With these three virtues, nudity and sex lose their sense of taboo. In fact, I found the characters respecting each other more when they were undressed! The filmed audience seemed like explorers wondering what this was all about and walked away at the end of the show somehow a little relieved that it wasn't as pornographic as they had thought it would be. Not just clothes were removed in Oh! Calcutta, but taboos too.

In the early eighties I was in a revival-sequel called Calcutta Revisited! with a small experimental theater group. Looking back I believe most of the actors got involved because we wanted to see each other naked. We were all closet exhibitionists who wanted a chance to see what it was like to be nude on stage with strangers, family, and friends looking on. The audience was an equal mix of the avant garde art house crowd weened on female performance artists smearing peanut butter on their breasts, lesbians who heard about my passion filled kissing scenes with two other actresses, nerdy guys who read about the play in the weekly reader, and of course our friends, family members, co-workers from our day jobs, roomies, and neighbors. The audience walked away a little disappointed that it wasn't a bit more pornographic. Full frontal nudity was no longer enough even with the addition of the lesbian scenes.

So please rent Oh Calcutta! (if you can find it) and visit a period of our past that wasn't so bad.

After the musical Hair combined a little nudity with a lot of witty, tuneful songs, Oh Calcutta came along and combined a lot of nudity with a number of remarkably dull sketches.

For the most part, these sketches appear to have a humorous intent, yet none of them come close to be really funny, although one short sketch about masturbating is mildly amusing. And at the end the actors put words in the mouths of the audience, and some of those lines are actually pretty good.

My first inclination was to stop watching altogether, but when I looked up the play in Wikipedia I saw that the sketches had been written by a number of famous people, including Jules Pfeiffer and Sam Shepard. So what I did was, I would watch the first few minutes of a sketch, fast forward when I got bored, check out a little of the sketch later on to see if it got better, which it never did, and go to the next sketch.

There are also a couple of naked dance numbers, which, like everything else, aren't especially good. And there are a few songs, co-written by the guy who created P.D.Q. Bach, that are really cheesy and bland.

In terms of the filming of the play, the beginning is awful. You see the audience (clearly not a real audience but actors chosen to look like an uptight crowd) and then backstage footage of the actors. Then there's some annoying video effects when the play starts. After that the director settles down for the most part and just lets the play unfold, but since it's a bad play, that's little comfort.

Why was Oh Calcutta one of the longest running Broadway plays? I've got to assume it's all the naked people. I think at the time it just seemed daring to go watch naked people grope each other on stage and talk about masturbation and wife swapping. It was transgressive and revolutionary. Unfortunately, it was also really bad.

It's so annoying that there's video of the original Oh Calcutta but none, so far as I can tell, of the original Hair. All we have is that horrible movie made in the seventies in which they took the name and a few of the songs and created something new and much worse. How is that fair?

I saw the original stage version of Oh! Calcutta! when they performed in San Francisco in the early 1970s. We didn't know what to expect and were a little hesitant about going to a play that was often raided!

We paid a princely sum for our tickets - $35 and that wasn't for the first row! Our seats were second row-center and those rows were very narrow! You can imagine our surprise at being so close to the action! As soon as the production began, several people in the front row stood up and left the theater, which only made our seats that much better!

It was a great play! We loved it and laughed through most of it. The only tense part of the play was when we heard the sirens of emergency vehicles in the street outside of the theater! For a moment, we thought it was one of the raids! We held our ground and remained seated and were the richer for it!

See the movie and see a part of our sexual history! I know I will!

I was 10, hiding under the dining table, while my parents thought I was asleep, I was watching Oh! Calcutta on the Dutch tv. It was an eyeopener for me, and though it caused a lot of upheaval in the media the next day, it showed that times where changing and that people no longer let there lives be ruled by others but made choices for themselves. In some ways, Oh! Calcutta was just fun. And the music was definately good. It is only a few years ago that it was first shown in Israel...a sign that in some countries of the world you are not as free as in others. Where gay marriage is normal in Holland, and gays are put to prison or to death in some other countries, sexual freedom is also not the same everywhere. Oh! Calcutta was a clear sign of the times, and still is a pleasure to watch.