Hairspray is the latest movie to become a stage musical to be then translated back to film in musical form. I am not a fan of musicals (I hated Rent and found The Producers irksome), but I thought Hairspray eminently bearable. Audiences can go and check out the film before the stage version arrives here, in Richard Loring’s production, in October.
John Waters’s 1988 film is one of his mid-period movies, when he became gently offbeat rather than utterly outrageous. It is not an exercise in shock or disgust — no eating of doggy-do, say, as in his Pink Flamingos (about ”the filthiest person alive”). Waters himself appears briefly right at the start of Hairspray, as a flasher in a dingy overcoat. Blink and you’ll miss him, but that’s the most outrageous moment in the whole of the musical.
Teenage Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonksy) is a devotee of a TV programme called The Corny Collins Show, which features local teenagers dancing to the hits of the day. This is 1962 and we’re in Baltimore, Waters’s beloved hometown. Baltimore gets a lovely early-morning greeting-in-song from Tracy when she wakes up; she’s certainly a cheery girl, despite being apparently unsuitable for an appearance on The Corny Collins Show because she is what the original movie describes as ”pleasantly plump”. In the new film, we have villainess Velma von Tussle (Michelle Pfeiffer) rejecting Tracy when she auditions because she’s ”short and stout”.
Tracy overcomes these obstacles in a traditional story of … well, overcoming obstacles to achieve one’s dream. On the way to achieving that dream, Tracy’s consciousness will be raised and she will become a crusader for racial integration — pretty progressive for Baltimore in 1962, it seems. Segregation is still going strong, and that’s what Tracy and her new-found black friends challenge.
Hairspray pushes that angle rather harder than Waters did in his original. It’s as though the musical wants to deploy a politically correct issue, one that few of us will have any doubts about nowadays, to make us feel good. It gets a rash of earnestness and the light comic tone vanishes for as long as it takes to hold a protest march, and then the audience can be left to luxuriate in its own lack of prejudice and sense of superiority to those racists of Baltimore 1962.
There is nothing in the musical like the hilarious scene of racial panic when Tracy’s friend Penny Pingleton’s mother goes looking for them in the ghetto — and every black person looks like an ogre to her. There is no moment equivalent to the one in which Tracy tells her boyfriend, in mid-snog, that she wishes she were darker of skin. That would be perhaps a bridge too far.
In general, though, Hairspray the musical is pleasant enough. The songs vary in quality; many feel generic and lack the charm of the old hits Waters threw at us in 1988. Some, though, are good, and there are plenty of well-staged dance scenes. The role of Tracy’s parents is expanded somewhat, with a lovely duet for Christopher Walken as Tracy’s dad and John Travolta as her mom.
Yes, you read right: Travolta as her mom. Travolta, in fat suit, wig, make-up and dress, takes the role the hefty drag queen Divine took in the original. But what a difference! Where Divine’s Edna Turnblad was a lumpen laundress hooked on diet pills, with a ridiculously growly voice and very bad hair, the worst thing you can say about Travolta’s Edna, as a character, is that she’s overly reluctant to leave the flat and hasn’t had a makeover for years.
Most irritatingly, in order to play Edna, Travolta goes all campy-poo, piling on an excess of cutsey little gestures and twinkly little giggles. It’s as though he is parodying the most twee of effeminate drag queens parodying Marilyn Monroe, when he should just be playing a trashy fat woman, dammit. Divine he ain’t, and that’s not a compliment.
Blonsky, on the other hand, sparkles as Tracy. She brings a fresh-faced self-confidence to the screen, making her ideal for the indomitable Tracy Turnblad. Walken is agreeable as dad Wilbur (taking the role from Jerry Stiller, who here appears as Mr Pinky, proprietor of the clothing store for large ladies; Ricki Lake, star of the original, also gets a walk-on by way of tribute). As Velma, Pfeiffer does well, as do Brittany Snow as her daughter Amber and Zac Efron as Tracy’s love, Link.
On the way from Waters’s delightfully cock-eyed conception to Broadway in 2002 to the present movie, Hairspray has perhaps inevitably been made more conventional. Narrative quirks have been ironed out and the importance of hairspray itself to the plot has been more firmly established.
Where Waters’s affirmations of oddness worked in a context of generalised bizarrerie, here being overweight is solemnly invoked as a way of coming to understand and help the oppressed racial other. Nonetheless, there are sufficient moments of delight in the musical and the defiant self-belief of Tracy Turnblad shines gloriously through.