Hairspray Review
Feb. 3rd, 2004 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stakebaitJust got back from seeing Hairspray on Broadway. So that's what they mean by a feel good show. :) It was tremendous fun, and I highly recommend you go see it if you like musicals, or the 60s, or chubby chicks, or cool set design, or dancing, or John Waters, or Harvey Firestein.
Especially that last one. He stole the show. He stole nearby shows. He stole shows that aren't actually on yet. He was fucking brilliant as the mother -- campy, but not campy in that arch, "aren't men in dresses too silly for words" way, just in the "this character is over the top and I'm gonna put her over the moon" way. I was worried that the audience would do what the audience did when I saw The Birdcage -- laugh at the serious touching scenes because it's a man in a dress. But they didn't. Either Firestein is just that good or this was a better audience or it's the difference of knowing the actors can hear you. It made me sad that Divine isn't alive still to play the role he created, but Firestein is a worthy successor and then some. He got a standing ovation and deserved every clap.
Motormouth Maybelle, despite being a little upstaged, was damned good too, and had a lovely song about being big blond and beautiful that is destined to be the RESPECT of fat girls everywhere. I don't know if it's my increasing age that makes me think the mothers are stealing the show from the ostensible leads, or whether it's an attempt to appeal to aging baby boomers, or an effect of having lots of talented older actresses for fewer parts, or what, but I thought the same thing about Mamma Mia!
Seeweed was a lot more charismatic and an awesome dancer, which made him much cooler but his relationship with Penny more confusing. And the girl who played Little Inez, who is actually 12 in real life, was awesome. Corny Collins was like the guy from Grease, only more so. Link was just as doofy as you'd expect, and they played up his hearthrob status with an unbelieveably phallic fake guitar, greatly to my amusement.
The throw aways and meta humor are nicely done. "They can keep us from kissing, but they can't keep us from singing." Bwah! "You were on ALL THREE channels."
Biggest delayed reaction joke grenade, "But Mrs. Von Tussle! Manipulating the judicial system to win a contest is unAmerican!" Beat. Beat. Beat. Oh, god, they mean Bush! Mer dies of laughter while everyone else looks at her funny.
Tracy was actually the biggest disappointment for me. Not because the actress wasn't good, because she was. Adorable, even. But because in the transition from movie to stage, somewhere between the actress and the book and the director, the fire has been lost. This Tracy never really comes off as an agitator, because she's just too cute for words. She's almost more of a Mary Sue -- when the not-so-nasty Amber Von Tussle asks "why does everybody like her?" you sort of think she has a point, because without the force of personality you're left with a fat girl with a love of dancing, a pretty face and an unusually progressive attitude towards integration -- all good things but, I'm here to testify, not usually enough to get you the heartthrob boy and win the popularity contest.
Plus, her dancing has been sanitized. Lots of bopping, lots of hands, but practically unique among the cast, no hips to speak of. It's almost like they didn't really have faith in their own thesis statement, that fat girls can be sexy. MM and Mrs. Turnblatt play it for laughs, and Tracy plays it for good clean fun, with a whole chorus of silhouetted backup dancers for all the love songs. Which was a nice effect, but in retrospect does kind of give me the impression that they think a fat chick in love can't hold the audience's interest for three minutes.
And they gave Penny a makeover at the end, which I was a little meh on. I liked her goofy, and I liked that Seaweed liked her goofy. Oh well.
Other things that were changed worked quite well. Losing the beatniks simplified the story and making Mrs. Von Tussle the TV producer, while not too plausible in the timeline, made sense of her power and kept the cast to a minimum.
The ending was cleaned up a bit, with the bad guys converted instead of discomfitted -- Amber and her Mom and the sponsor and Penny's mom all won over to integration. They've managed to make racists versus integrationists story line work without having any actual racists, which I suppose is an achievement.
The songs are good -- not necessarily the kind that stand on their own without the show all that well, but they make sense and they're catchy and they could easily be actual 60s music, for all I know. It was just *fun*. And I seriously need to get the words to that MotorMouth Maybelle song, because if I ever have to sing in public, now I know just what it's going to be. :)
Mer
Especially that last one. He stole the show. He stole nearby shows. He stole shows that aren't actually on yet. He was fucking brilliant as the mother -- campy, but not campy in that arch, "aren't men in dresses too silly for words" way, just in the "this character is over the top and I'm gonna put her over the moon" way. I was worried that the audience would do what the audience did when I saw The Birdcage -- laugh at the serious touching scenes because it's a man in a dress. But they didn't. Either Firestein is just that good or this was a better audience or it's the difference of knowing the actors can hear you. It made me sad that Divine isn't alive still to play the role he created, but Firestein is a worthy successor and then some. He got a standing ovation and deserved every clap.
Motormouth Maybelle, despite being a little upstaged, was damned good too, and had a lovely song about being big blond and beautiful that is destined to be the RESPECT of fat girls everywhere. I don't know if it's my increasing age that makes me think the mothers are stealing the show from the ostensible leads, or whether it's an attempt to appeal to aging baby boomers, or an effect of having lots of talented older actresses for fewer parts, or what, but I thought the same thing about Mamma Mia!
Seeweed was a lot more charismatic and an awesome dancer, which made him much cooler but his relationship with Penny more confusing. And the girl who played Little Inez, who is actually 12 in real life, was awesome. Corny Collins was like the guy from Grease, only more so. Link was just as doofy as you'd expect, and they played up his hearthrob status with an unbelieveably phallic fake guitar, greatly to my amusement.
The throw aways and meta humor are nicely done. "They can keep us from kissing, but they can't keep us from singing." Bwah! "You were on ALL THREE channels."
Biggest delayed reaction joke grenade, "But Mrs. Von Tussle! Manipulating the judicial system to win a contest is unAmerican!" Beat. Beat. Beat. Oh, god, they mean Bush! Mer dies of laughter while everyone else looks at her funny.
Tracy was actually the biggest disappointment for me. Not because the actress wasn't good, because she was. Adorable, even. But because in the transition from movie to stage, somewhere between the actress and the book and the director, the fire has been lost. This Tracy never really comes off as an agitator, because she's just too cute for words. She's almost more of a Mary Sue -- when the not-so-nasty Amber Von Tussle asks "why does everybody like her?" you sort of think she has a point, because without the force of personality you're left with a fat girl with a love of dancing, a pretty face and an unusually progressive attitude towards integration -- all good things but, I'm here to testify, not usually enough to get you the heartthrob boy and win the popularity contest.
Plus, her dancing has been sanitized. Lots of bopping, lots of hands, but practically unique among the cast, no hips to speak of. It's almost like they didn't really have faith in their own thesis statement, that fat girls can be sexy. MM and Mrs. Turnblatt play it for laughs, and Tracy plays it for good clean fun, with a whole chorus of silhouetted backup dancers for all the love songs. Which was a nice effect, but in retrospect does kind of give me the impression that they think a fat chick in love can't hold the audience's interest for three minutes.
And they gave Penny a makeover at the end, which I was a little meh on. I liked her goofy, and I liked that Seaweed liked her goofy. Oh well.
Other things that were changed worked quite well. Losing the beatniks simplified the story and making Mrs. Von Tussle the TV producer, while not too plausible in the timeline, made sense of her power and kept the cast to a minimum.
The ending was cleaned up a bit, with the bad guys converted instead of discomfitted -- Amber and her Mom and the sponsor and Penny's mom all won over to integration. They've managed to make racists versus integrationists story line work without having any actual racists, which I suppose is an achievement.
The songs are good -- not necessarily the kind that stand on their own without the show all that well, but they make sense and they're catchy and they could easily be actual 60s music, for all I know. It was just *fun*. And I seriously need to get the words to that MotorMouth Maybelle song, because if I ever have to sing in public, now I know just what it's going to be. :)
Mer
