This paper explores the cultural significance of and the public response to the genre of the musical in 1960s Israel. Since the early years of the decade, the Broadway musical colonized the Israeli stage largely through Giora Godik’s lavish productions. In 1961, he mounted an English-language version of West Side Story and then, beginning with My Fair Lady (1965), continued to stage a string of Broadway hits in Hebrew. Godik’s musicals were greeted with great pride as a demonstration that Israeli theater could manage complicated and lavish theatrical productions in the most professional American-standard fashion. They symbolized a new phase in Israeli cultural consumerism and Godik himself stood for the spirit of risk-happy capitalism. His turbulent career that ended in German exile was perceived to be emblematic of dare devil American-style entrepreneurship. By the end of the 1960s, the conventional Broadway musical lost some of its luster and the staging of the counter-cultural Hair (1970) became a sensation. Its candor about sex and drugs, antiwar stance, and, especially, display of nude bodies on stage shocked and titillated Israelis and prompted endless comments in the press. Hair inspired radically different responses both artistically and politically but ultimately was regarded by mainstream critics as well as audiences, mostly middle class patrons who could afford the expensive tickets, as evidence that Israel did not share in the American experience. The musical provided Israelis with the double voyeuristic pleasure of staring at naked bodies on stage as well as ostensibly at another nation’s troubles.