Word: hairsprays
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...Here's "Hairspray," without the songs (for now) and with a hint of the verbal...
...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...
...Waters' "Hairspray" was as much tribute to the early 60s as parody of it. He loved the old songs, loved the dances that accompanied them - the Madison, the Twist, the Continental, the Fly, the Roach - and in his film reproduced a dozen of them, with an archaeologist's fidelity. For the Broadway version Waters is listed as "consultant"; he claims he was much too bossy ever to collaborate. He also knew that the shoe would have "new" songs; the pastiche conceit embraced not only the ransacking of tacky 50s-60s modes of decor, coiffure and couture but the rephrasing...
...Marc Shaiman, the show's composer (and lyricist, with his partner Scott Wittman), built an exceptional body of work as arranger of pop standards for Bette Midler. He also collaborated with Trey Parker on the settings for the wonderfully knowledgeable songs in "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut." "Hairspray" is his first "original" score. I'm sorry I have to put quote marks around the adjectives modifying his work here, but the score is not a general evocation of first-decade rock 'n roll, as "Grease" so famously was and "The Rocky Horror Show" so brilliantly. Almost all the Shaiman...
...play over and over, at lease-breaking volume, and whose lyrics I copied so I could sing along. It's where the show's spirit finally shouts, after two-and-a-half-hours of clever smiling. It's the song that elevates, levitates, rejuvenates the Hairspray" audience and keeps them jumping through the curtain calls and inevitable encores. It's where rock'n roll could have gone, or should have stayed. It lets you sing along with the "Hairspray" sisterhood. And, since it's got a great beat, you can dance...