Collection: The Biltmore Theater HAiR The Musical Offset Poster

20" x 14" unframed made in the USA.

In memory of Michael Butler November 26,1926 - November 7, 2022.

Repost obituary from The New York Times: 

Michael Butler, a flamboyant financier and producer who brought the groundbreaking rock musical “Hair” to Broadway in 1968 and then to the world via a dozen road companies, died on Nov. 7 at a nursing home in Reseda, Calif. He was 95.

His family announced the death.

Mr. Butler was from a moneyed Chicago family, the Butlers of Butler Paper Corporation and Butler Aviation, and he was comfortable in the world of polo, debutantes and expensive clothes. So when he put his money behind “the American tribal love-rock musical,” as the show called itself, the incongruity was hard to ignore.

“Butler, who is driven about in an antique Rolls-Royce, feels he’s a hippie,” the Long Island newspaper Newsday wrote in 1968, two months after “Hair” opened on Broadway. “He even looks like a hippie, in leather jacket, bushy mustache and long hair. But the jacket cost a bundle from an exclusive men’s shop in town.”

Also incongruous was that Mr. Butler’s only previous producing experience had involved staging polo matches and similar sporting events. He had seen the original Off Broadway version of “Hair,” produced by Joseph Papp at the Public Theater in 1967, and decided he was the person to take it to Broadway.