Leanne Jones is a remarkable Tracy with a talent as high and wide as her scooped-up hair.
The great thing about John Waters’ 1988 cult movie was that you felt every expense had been spared. But even if Hairspray, in the process of being turned into a Broadway musical, has lost some of its glorious tackiness, it retains its generous spirit: this is still a show that not only hymns physical difference but also the basic right to racial integration.
Even in its new theatrical form, the book by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan remains perilously thin. Unlike, of course, the show’s heroine, Tracy Turnblad, a 16-year-old Baltimore girl who is extremely well-rounded. Avoirdupois notwithstanding, Tracy gets hooked on a TV dance show and determines to beat the favoured contestant to become Miss Hairspray 1962. Part of the show’s good-hearted charm lies in seeing how Tracy, from her first experience of sexy black dancing in the school gym, determines to fight segregation on Baltimore’s daytime TV.
At its best, the show gently mocks the naivety of white liberalism. “I wish every day were negro day,” Tracy remarks of TV’s monthly obeisance to Baltimore’s racial divide. “In our house, it is,” one of Tracy’s black chums wanly retorts. At its worst, Hairspray lapses into sentimental piety. Where the show really scores is in its ability to integrate serious issues into a lightweight plot.
Jerry Mitchell’s joyous choreography is the beating heart of the show. There is something dionysiac about it; and, if the show achieves the ecstasy one looks for in a musical, it comes largely through the dance routines.
But the performances, in Jack O’Brien’s deliciously fluid production, underline the show’s basic benevolence. Leanne Jones is a remarkable Tracy with a talent as high and wide as her scooped-up hair. She puts across Marc Shaiman’s numbers with belting brio. And Michael Ball is very funny as her muscular moll of a mum who once entertained dreams of being a designer. “I thought I was going to be the biggest thing in brassieres,” Ball announces in gravel-voiced tones. What makes him so good is that he reminds us that heftiness is not incompatible with haute couture.
Mel Smith, as Tracy’s joke-retailing dad, seems underemployed until he joins Ball in a front-cloth duo.
You will laugh, you will scream, you might even shed a sentimental tear or two
Tense nervous headache? Feeling a little peaky? Hungover? Then for heaven’s sake give this show a miss. It will strike you as a terrifying vision of hell. All that noise, my dear, and the people.
If you are up for a good time, however, and especially if you are a teenage girl who has just downed a couple of alcopops, it will strike you as heaven on earth. You will laugh, you will scream, you might even shed a sentimental tear or two. I even managed to make quite a night of it myself, and I’m male and middle-aged, as the National Theatre boss, Nicholas Hytner, is fond of pointing out.
The mystery about this ebullient and good-hearted show is that it has taken so long to arrive in England, and then only to find a berth at the Shaftesbury, which, after such jaw-droppingly terrible shows as Napoleon, Lautrec, Batboy and others too ghastly to recall, is widely regarded as a graveyard for doomed musicals.
But, on Broadway, Hairspray is a smash hit. I caught it there five years ago, and it is still going strong, having grossed some $200 million to date.
Based on the 1988 John Waters movie, and recently turned into a film musical starring John Travolta, Hairspray tells the story of Tracy Turnblad, a short, rotund teenage schoolgirl who is determined to become a star dancer on the Corny Collins TV pop show.
The year is 1962, the action takes place in Baltimore, and the irrepressible Tracy is determined not to let her chunky body rule out her chances. She endures insults and malice along the way, but sticks to her guns, and even succeeds in gaining the love of the town hunk. And she instinctively sides with the black youngsters, who are allowed to participate in the strictly segregated show only on special “Negro” days. Hairspray, which appears to have barely a thought in its head, is actually a touching protest against prejudice, and a celebration of the birth of America’s civil-rights movement as Tracy brings the racial barriers crashing down.
Mercifully, the show never descends into worthiness. Not that it could, with its preposterous hairstyles, kitsch, retina-bruising designs and a superb pop score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, which gloriously captures the sounds of pop before the arrival of the Beatles - girl groups, rock and roll, rhythm and blues and an amazing gospel number that almost lifts the roof off the theatre.
There’s even a delightful vaudevillian routine for Michael Ball, who plays Tracy’s corpulent mum in spectacular big-bosomed drag and looks as if he’s having the time of his life, and Mel Smith as her devoted, joke-shop-owning husband.
The lyrics occasionally aspire to real wit - I particularly liked the song for the glamorously bitchy and racist villain of the piece (excellent Tracie Bennett), who insists: “You can say I’m a bigot but it’s just not true/I love Sammy Davis and he’s black and a Jew.”
Director Jack O’Brien, who alternates raucous musicals like this with superb revivals of Tom Stoppard at the Lincoln Centre, ensures that sentiment and laughter are mixed in just the right proportions in a show that offers a sugar-rush of pleasure.
Jerry Mitchell’s choreography is splendidly effervescent and newcomer Leanne Jones, straight out of drama school and making her professional debut, has exactly the right bubble and bounce as Tracy, moving with a lightness of foot that belies her avoirdupois.
The show might be less slick than in New York, but there is no mistaking its big, raucous heart.
I saw Hairspray at the final preview rather than the press night, and the audience’s whooping response and spontaneous standing ovation suggest it could prove to be the big hit that has eluded the Shaftesbury for so long.
Michael Ball… gives one of the warmest, funniest and most oddly touching performances in a musical that I have ever seen
I don’t know about yours, but my beehive had capsized with excitement even before the curtain had even gone up at the West End opening night of this Broadway musical version of Hairspray. Despite, I might add, furious back-combing and strenuous action with an aerosol in the gents to keep it erect. Normally, I go for the kind of windswept look that would count as a “hairdo violation” at the heroine’s Baltimore High School. But I thought a bit of effort barnet-wise was appropriate for a musical that comes boasting eight Tony Awards. Was the show worth it?
Yes, yes and again yes. The piece takes us back to the early Sixties and a world before mass-obesity and worries about the ozone-layer had had time to make a chubby teenager with a spray-can begin to look like a dubious role model. So was this an innocent time in the Land of the Free? Not for blacks, it wasn’t. Homing in on the Corny Collins television show, where teenagers try out trendy new dances, Hairspray exposes the segregation that relegated black kids to one “Negro Day” a month with Corny - or rather does until our portly 16-year-old heroine, Tracy Turnblad (an adorably starry-eyed and idealistic Leanne Jones) proves that she can not only out-Mash-Potato all the slim richer white kids but put an end to discrimination, too.
Powered by elating Sixties dance routines that are so infectious they will have to install compulsory seat-belts to prevent the audience from storming the stage, Jack O’Brien’s production lays out perfectly the deal this show makes with the punters. It’s a deliciously droll double-bluff: a giddy, high-spirited spoof of a youthful protest piece that, with the lightest of touches, manages to be the real thing at the same time.
As a fan of the original 1988 John Waters’ film that starred Divine, the mountainous, no-holds-barred drag act, I had worried that the material would lose too much of its conscious comic tackiness when converted into a Broadway musical, despite the arch wit of the book, score and lyrics.
Michael Ball in the Divine role seemed about as excitingly blasphemous a piece of casting as, say, hiring Michael Crawford to play Leigh Bowery.
In fact, the fat-suited Ball, who is appreciably better than John Travolta in the recently released movie version of the show, gives one of the warmest, funniest and most oddly touching performances in a musical that I have ever seen. When Edna is a housebound slattern, he resembles Nero in the wake of some disastrous hormone injection; when Edna is spiffed up and learns to appreciate the worth of her girth, he has a weird look of A S Byatt. Yet with wondrously supple and amusing timing, he packs in an extraordinary range of tones - from moments when he gruffly acknowledges his maleness to sequences where he suggests a poignant shy delicacy and undimmed wonder in this woman who can’t leave the house because she’s ashamed of her bulk.
Hairspray knocks spots off Grease where the college kids are about as ethnically diverse as the Ku Klux Klan. Here, there are some great roles for black artistes, particularly Motormouth Maybelle, the R&B disc jockey who sings up a storm in Johnnie Fiori’s knockout portrayal. And because it is about more than show business and contrives to be airy and fresh as well as knowing, it leaves The Producers looking a bit thin on top.
The musical resembles Grease, then? Yes, but only a bit, for Hairspray is wittier, funnier, more good-natured and, without being pretentious, more morally and politically aware.
As I’ve battled through its tiny, gridlocked foyer into the cavernous auditorium below, I have often wondered if the Shaftesbury Theatre has a death-wish; but seldom more than last night. Whoever decided to bring the stage version of the film Hairspray to London immediately after its remake has come bouncing on to British screens, gaining rave reviews and, no doubt, audiences for whom one viewing is enough?
Well, if the impresarios have goofed, they’ve goofed happily, for the musical is as delightful as I recall it being on Broadway three years ago and more immediate than it could ever be in the cinema. True, the tale of chubby, chunky Tracy Turnblad, who wears what looks like a lacquered wolverine on her head and thinks she resembles Jackie Kennedy, is unashamedly and, at times, absurdly sentimental. But when Leanne Jones’s Tracy is bounding about the stage exuding all-American resilience and optimism - well, she brought out the inner cheerleader I didn’t know I had.
Her world is Baltimore 1962, a place evoked by dresses vaguely indebted to Doris Day and male clothes seemingly designed for aspiring golfers, and her miniworld is the Corny Collins Television Show, which allows kids to dance and maybe even win the Ultra-Clutch Hairspray Company’s annual Miss Teenage Hairspray Contest.
The musical resembles Grease, then? Yes, but only a bit, for Hairspray is wittier, funnier, more good-natured and, without being pretentious, more morally and politically aware.
Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan’s book is a salute to difference. That’s defined both as being fat, like Jones’s Tracy or Michael Ball as her gloriously bloated mother, and, more seriously, as being black in racially divided Maryland. So our heroine’s aim isn’t only to do well on the dance floor, beating her plastic-doll schoolmate Amber, but to integrate Corny Collins’s show, besting Amber’s ruthlessly ambitious, racially bigoted mother, Velma.
Since Rachael Wooding’s Amber has “acne of the soul”, and Tracie Bennett’s Velma something like spiritual smallpox, it is obvious she will succeed. But anyone would forgive the show’s wishfulness, given the ebullience of Marc Shaiman’s rock, which might have been written for and delivered by Elvis himself, and the quality of Jack O’Brien’s cast, which matches its Broadway counterpart for energy.
There are stand-out black performers in Johnnie Fiori’s magnificent music-shop empress and Adrian Hansel as her son Seaweed and, from Ball’s vast dimpling rhino of a Mrs Turnblad and Mel Smith as his/her not-exactly-wee husband, two actors with enough sly sense of mischief to embellish any upmarket panto at Christmas.
What is surprising is that the show gently spoofs itself and what’s refreshing is the sophistication of its jokes. As friendly and unfriendly whites pack into Fiori’s music shop, someone remarks that “if we get any more in here, it’ll be a suburb”. You wouldn’t get lines like that in Grease, Fame or any other ode to American high-school life. No wonder I left the Shaftesbury thinking it was a pretty welcoming place after all.
Director Jack O’Brien… offers a fast-paced, feel-good and irresistibly entertaining adventure from start to finish.
Five years on from its Broadway opening, this Tony Award-winning musical inspired by John Waters’ 1988 cult movie finally reaches London, and what a breath of fresh air it turns out to be.
The action takes place in Baltimore 1962 where plump 16-year-old schoolgirl Tracy Turnbald dreams of dancing on the local Corny Collins TV show. Sadly for her, station producer Velma Von Tussle is nearly as prejudiced about people’s weight as she is about the colour of their skin. And so Tracy finds herself in the front line doing her bit to campaign against intolerance, while still finding time to win the heart of cute crooner Link Larkin.
In tackling such a scenario, director Jack O’Brien could have easily overplayed the sentimentality, but instead he offers a fast-paced, feel-good and irresistibly entertaining adventure from start to finish.
In fact, O’Brien ensures that the narrative flow slickly integrates Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan’s witty libretto, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman’s memorable score and Jerry Mitchell’s high-energy choreography. The latter’s contribution is outstanding, particularly in production numbers like I Can Hear the Bells and You Can’t Stop the Beat. Add to the mix the vibrant colours of David Rockwell’s sets and William Ivey Long’s costumes and the sixties transformation is complete.
Within an impressive ensemble, spirited Leanne Jones may be making her professional debut as Tracy, but she has all the talent and confidence of a seasoned professional. Ben James-Ellis is charming as love interest Link, while Elinor Collett proves she has a gift for comedy as Tracy’s best friend Penny.
Credit also to Tracie Bennett’s grotesque Velma Von Tussle, Adrian Hansel’s quick-stepping Seaweed and Johnnie Fiori as Motormouth Maybelle, who provides the real goosebump moment of the show in I Know Where I’ve Been. In what has become something of a tradition, a man plays Tracy’s mother Edna, a role it appears Michael Ball was born to play and he is obviously loving every minute.
It’s driven by a really sharp script and lyrics, but also by Jerry Mitchell’s terrific choreography and by Marc Shaiman’s non-stop, grab-you-by-the-legs, gospel, rock and doo-wop music.
Buoyant, bouffant and big-hearted, Hairspray is girly, curly pleasure. At a stroke, this show should change for ever the reputation of the Shaftesbury, until now renowned as the natural home of musical stinkers.
Jack O’Brien’s production has a new star in Leanne Jones: it’s amazing that this is her professional debut. In Michael Ball and Mel Smith, it has two established stars being surprising. It’s driven by a really sharp script and lyrics, but also by Jerry Mitchell’s terrific choreography and by Marc Shaiman’s non-stop, grab-you-by-the-legs, gospel, rock and doo-wop music. Johnnie Fiori is magnificent as the gold-laméd Motormouth Maybelle; the beautiful Dynamite girlband shimmer husky-voiced across the stage in red glitter. What’s more, despite all the glitz and bounce and brass and jokes, this is a musical with bottom. Big bottom.
Based on John Waters’s 1988 cult movie, the show has been a five-year-long hit on Broadway and has recently been filmed with John Travolta in the dame role (will all boyish baritones now start trying to be women?). Set in Baltimore in 1962 - a place of racial bigotry and perfectly tended teeth - it stars a short plump teenager, daughter of a laundress, who sets her sights not merely on appearing on the ‘Corny Collins Show’, a teenage dance programme sponsored by a hairspray, but on being crowned that year’s Miss Hairspray. The favourite is a glossy, skinny blonde, being pushed to fame by her even glossier, blonder, skinnier mother: ‘We can learn a lot from the mistakes of Miss Debbie Reynolds.’
With the lightest of touches - it continually sends up the possibility of being meaningful - Hairspray is about people being excluded, ignored and made to feel weird. ‘They don’t put people like us on television,’ sighs Mrs Turnblad over her iron. When Tracy becomes intoxicated with the dance routines of her black schoolmates - who are allowed only one segregated day on the dance show - she ingenuously exclaims: ‘I wish every day was Negro Day.’ ‘In our house, it is,’ says one of her friends.
You know Leanne Jones is going to be musical newcomer of the year from the moment the curtain goes up on one of David Rockwell’s perky, cardboard interiors, designed to look like pastiche birthday cards for Sixties teenagers. Propped on her pillows, cushioned on enormous tresses, Jones belts out the opening number so vigorously you’re surprised she can stay in bed.
Michael Ball, not what you’d call intuitive casting for Mom, is a revelation. He starts the show in a housecoat and support stockings: he/she is mountainous, saggy-breasted and (crucially) straggle-maned; he ends up looking like an animated knickerbocker glory, with high, coiled hair and swirling silky dress. He plays the Dame card terrifically well; most of the time with a voice pitched like a woman’s rather than a panto parody, so that when he drops into male gruffness the comic effect is really comic. When the women anti-segregationists are banged up, the jail is filled with the sound of female shrieks and squeals. Ball’s bass tones cut through the high-pitched hullabaloo: ‘It’s just us girls in the big dark house,’ he booms, as he pulls the bars away.
Mel Smith as the Daddy has too little to do (and his hair doesn’t get a makeover) but he does that little with such sad-sack amiability that he’s a consistently benign presence: his ‘Timeless to Me’ duo with Ball is one of the unexpected showstoppers; when they kiss, it’s more kind than camp.
Apart from anything else, this is a really good hair play, in which the highest of compliments concerns ‘the record-breaking extreme your hair has reached’ and in which you can guess what’s between people’s ears by looking at what’s on top of their heads. The appealing Elinor Collett - the oomphless best friend with Bambi legs - is a case in point. She falls for Seaweed, an ultra-accomplished black dancer elegantly played by Adrian Hansel: ‘I’m very pleased I’m scared to be here,’ she squeaks, as she finds herself close to black faces for the first time in her life. By the end of the show she has become a free, wild thing: you can be sure of that, since her lank locks have been transformed into a bouncing tangle of corkscrew curls.
There are flick-ups and beehives and backbrushed nests, secured with bows and forehead-clenching hairbands; there’s a Philip Treacy sculptural moment when three girls parade under hairdos which variously look like enormous pricked ears, a spindle and a spiral. Tracy drops extra layers on to her barnet so that it becomes as fluffy and full as a Russian fur hat. There have already begun to be hair tributes from audience members, who arrive bouffanted and beehived; these are likely to be more and more extravagant as the show takes off.
This is part of a new upsurge for the musical in London, which has been largely in a slump - too many vapid shows, too many revivals, too many dully replicated adaptations of movies. Now it’s all looking more promising: last month, the austere, high-minded and spirited Parade opened at the Donmar; next year Jersey Boys, a documentary musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, arrives in the West End from the States and Marguerite, a Second World War love story based on La Dame aux Camelias, has its world premiere at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. Dissimilar in content and style, the important thing these shows have in common is that they all have proper subjects and are all setting out to explore those subjects in their own way: non-synthetically. What makes Hairspray irresistible is that it has not a moment of earnestness - it comes on like theatrical bubble-gum, all pink, poppy and elastic - and yet it bats more winningly for the right side than many more po-faced offerings. Hairspray deserves a permanent wave.
Feelgood, romantic comedy of a musical
Here it is at last, the plump girls’ feelgood, romantic comedy of a musical, whose dancing heels take a knockout kick at racist bigots in downtown Baltimore 45 years ago. Hairspray catches the heady, hopeful atmosphere of America teetering on the verge of Sixties cultural and political change. Rhythm and blues and Motown, then in their earlier stages, pump out the musical’s seductive beat in the hectic dynamism of Jack O’Brien’s production with Jerry Mitchell’s quicksilver choreography. Agitation for civil rights, soon to gain powerful momentum, begins right here in the city. Sex and love, those vital ingredients without which no musical has legs, do not come in far behind.
Hairspray, now in its fifth Broadway year, sent the rare, sweet smell of success wafting through the Shaftesbury last night. Inspired by John Walters’s camp, Eighties feast of a film it paints a wicked picture of blue-collar Baltimore, where girls crave their 15 minutes of fame on TV and boys crave girls. It comes at us in rare musical parts: the first part is low-camp satire and burlesque: Michael Ball deliciously fattened up and dragged down in bland frocks and lurid gowns, majestically slips into the role of the fat, foghorned laundress, Edna Turnblad, who responds to a large insult with a majestically contemptuous “Excuse me.” Leanne Jones, in an astonishingly accomplished stage debut, plays Edna’s big-sized daughter, Tracy, whose hair stands high as a beehive-and who hankers to become Miss Teenage Hairspray on local TV. The other part takes a radically political turn in a Baltimore where young blacks and whites cannot dance together.
It is through Jones’s endearingly earnest Tracy, who dances with a lightness belying her size, that links between love, comedy and radical politicsare forged. “I just think it’s stupid we can’t all dance together,” Tracy says and leads the picketing of the local TV station. Here Tracie Bennett’s witch-like, blonde and racist producer schemes to ensure her evil daughter, Rachel Wooding’s Amber, beats Tracy for the coveted Hairspray title. The book by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan may culminate in typical, glorious absurdity when Ball bursts out of a giant can of Hairspray to sing the tremendous last number,You Can’t Stop The Beat, but the musical is sustained by its attack on racial discrimination and its alluring, escapist, fairytale elements. Ben James-Ellis’s would-be hunk, Link Larkin, collides with Tracy and love at first sight breaks out on both sides: “We won’t go all the way, but I’ll go pretty far,” she sings, dreaming of an imminent,erotic future. And the record shop where Johnnie Fiori’s exuberant Motormouth Maybelle puts her terrific voice to good effect draws blacks and whites together.
Marc Shaiman’s urgent score, with clever, often witty lyrics written with Scott Whitman, keeps Hairspray pulsating with musical excitement as well as political anger. And Leanne Jones, as smitten, adolescent lover and Miss Teenage Hairspray, effortlessly commands the stage. She will hearten all actresses who imagine that only the pencil-thin can inherit the lead dressing room.
Its heart… is triumphantly in the right place.
I confess. I wanted to hate ‘Hairspray’. I’ve nothing against its loveably chubby heroine Tracy Turnblad (victim of her school’s anti-fat bimbos), who teams up with the black kids from Special Ed to overthrow ’60s racial prejudice and fulfil her dreams by (get this) busting their non-white dance moves on primetime TV. It was actually the thought of Michael Ball in drag which made me want to change profession.
But thanks to Jack O’Brien’s insanely uplifting production, I’m eating my words. True, O’Brien can do nothing to plump up the size-zero plot, a spindly coathanger for makeovers, momma/daughter bonding, starry-eyed snogs and XXL emotional razzmatazz. True, the lyrics sometimes suck - Maybelle (the show’s black big momma) has to get her mouth around a rack of chunkily affirmative couplets whose only relationship to rap is putting a ‘c’ in front of it. And true, the black/fat equivalences (Tracy’s chums’ ancestors were slaves, she’s enslaved by the cheeseburger) might be troubling if thought were the object here.
Luckily, it isn’t. This may be brainless pleasure, but its heart (a lovely duckling who wins through without becoming a nasty swan) is triumphantly in the right place. Its butt is in the right place too, thanks to Jerry Mitchell’s glorious seat-shimmying choreography. Leanne Jones (Tracy) shakes it with innocence and charm; her blonde oppressors (ma-and-daughter team Tracie Bennett and Rachael Wooding) make great pre- and post-menopause versions of psycho-Barbie. Ball’s fat-suit lends him delightful comic gravitas as Tracy’s ma; his duets with hubbie Mel Smith make nicely affectionate vaudeville. And the encounter between black and white music gives the score booty-shaking zing. Beyond that, it is, essentially, a two-and-a-half hour fantasy that Oprah’s target audience could stick their supersized hopes up the super-toned ass of WASP America. But what’s not to like about that?
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August 10th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
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