'Hairspray' overflows in charm, fun
Hairspray runs through Feb. 13 at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. $42-$80. 813 229-7827 or toll-free 1-800-955-1045; www.tbpac.org
By JOHN FLEMING
Published February 2, 2005
TAMPA - Hairspray is a great big beach ball of a musical, all bright colors and lighthearted fun, an infectious homage to the '60s that opened Tuesday night at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.
At first, Hairspray seems to be merely a good-time sendup of teen dance and romance on The Corny Collins Show, Baltimore's answer to American Bandstand in 1962. But before it's over, the show cleverly manages to work in issues of race and class and self-image in a way that balances perfectly with the cotton-candy score by Marc Shaiman (music and lyrics) and Scott Wittman (lyrics).
Keala Settle plays chubby Tracy Turnblad, who goes from detention and special ed to Miss Teenage Hairspray, like an unstoppable avalanche. Settle is a tremendous ball of energy, talent and charm from her wake-up number, Good Morning Baltimore, to the triumphant finale, You Can't Stop the Beat.
Edna Turnblad, Tracy's mother, is portrayed by John Pinette, completely persuasive in a plus-sized pink shift doing the ironing and mending at home. It's something of a disingenuous cliche for men playing women to say that they treat it as a character role, not a drag act, but in Pinette's performance, that is precisely right. He is the ideal mother, sweet and understanding as well as a lot of fun, as in Tracy and Edna's first act showstopper, Welcome to the '60s.
Shaiman's score is loaded with deft touches of Brill Building pop, from girl groups to Phil Spector's wall of sound, but he and Wittman also are capable of a gem like Timeless, a romantic duet between Edna and her husband, Wilbur (Stephen DeRosa), that might have been written by an old Broadway pro like Cy Coleman.
The cast is as strong as it gets for a tour, with especially fine performances by Charlotte Crossley as the rhyming Motormouth Maybelle, Troy Britton Johnson as Corny, Chandra Lee Schwartz as Tracy's pal, Penny, and Alan Mingo Jr. as Seaweed, Penny's boyfriend. Even the smaller roles are sharply performed, such as Shannon Antalan as Seaweed's little sister, Inez.
Director Jack O'Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell were fresh off doing The Full Monty when they got to Hairspray, and by then they had the staging of this cartoony musical genre down to near perfection. Inspired by the campy John Waters movie, Hairspray is beautifully danced, without calling too much attention to its choreography, except in numbers in which dancing is the point, as when the kids do "the Madison" at a sock hop.
Even though the show runs two hours, 45 minutes, including intermission, the pell-mell pacing and fluid scene changes never let things drag.