Word: amberes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fetching it is. The show is a little too sure of the pleasure it expects to give: virtually every song has a built-in encore. In high school, "Hairspray" would have been voted The Most Likely to Think It's the Most Likely to Succeed. The show is Amber pretending to be Tracy...
...later took that idea and honed it to putting people on his show who were even dumber, uglier and more deranged than the people who watched it.) But the show's producer, Velma Von Tussle (Linda Hart), insists on keeping the cast prim and pretty, with her blond daughter Amber (Laura Bell Bundy) as the Shrewish American Princess and hunky Link Larkin (Matthew Morrison) as her consort...
...Soon Tracy is the most popular gal on the dance floor. Wait a minute, Amber thinks, that's my job, and squalls, with a lovely petulance, "Everybody, stop liking her!" But everybody can't stop. Link, the divoonest guy in town, feels a strange urge to be with the fat girl. Even Edna is impressed by Tracy's new radiance: "If I'd known you were gonna get on the show, I never woulda said don't do it." Tracy also gets endorsements. At Mr. Pinky's Hefty Hideaway, Mr. P. wants Tracy to be the shop's "exclusive spokesperson...
...Enlightened and emboldened, Tracy leads picketers against Corky's all-white show. All the ladies are arrested and land in the custody of a nasty prison matron ("Think of me as a mother - who eats her young"). The Von Tussles get sprung because Amber once had done a, let's call it a favor for the governor. Tracy is aghast, as any good Democrat would be, in 1962 or 2000: "Manipulating the judicial system just to win a contest is unethical!" Tracy, alone in her cell, is visited by the now lovestruck Link. "You look beautiful!" he rhapsodizes...
...show's book has a few showbiz references, both of its period (Penny, quoting Louise from "Gypsy," plaintively states, ""I'm a pretty girl, Mama!") and out of it (Amber gets anointed Miss Hairspray and, when Tracy and her supporters demand the crown on her head, proclaims in her most menacing Charlton Heston fashion, "You'll have to rip it from my cold dead hands"). But most of the writing has a fidelity to character comedy that kept me smiling as I was typing these now-familiar snatches of dialogue. It also tucks a moral inside: not the 60s dream...