Word: hairsprays
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Rockwell, 46, is called, sometimes dismissively, an entertainment architect. He made his name with the fizzy-then-fizzled Planet Hollywood restaurants and has cemented it with the sets for the new Broadway musical Hairspray. But his peculiar talent is taking the notion of entertainment to new places, not just restaurants and sports stadiums but also malls and hotels and even hospitals. The spaces he designs are intended to elicit an emotional response; they're spectacular, unexpected, piquant...
Architectural purists dismiss Rockwell's creations as stagecraft. There is a sense that the attention he's getting for Hairspray is appropriate because his work has always been set building, not creating a fully functioning environment. Even at the Mohegan Sun, for all its finery, the empty space and boring roof structure are quite visible beyond the panels of beads that form the ceiling. You can see through the illusion...
...Hairspray certainly looks terrific. Scenery designer David Rockwell goes for wit and color (prettiest in pink) rather than bombast. A forest of microphones and klieg lights sprouts from the ceiling; disembodied heads appear, Laugh-In style, inside big-haired pictures that wiggle back and forth. If this is eye candy, dish out more...
...though the show turns Waters' subversive (if rather slipshod) movie into a feel-good sitcom, that's mostly O.K. Waters based his story on a real Baltimore teen TV show of the late 1950s and '60s, and the naive outrage of Hairspray heroine Tracy Turnblad at the show's race discrimination--blacks are relegated to a once-a-month "Negro day"--is satisfying in a storybook, wish-fulfilling way. As the chunky Tracy, Marissa Jaret Winokur is a buoyant fireplug who almost convinces us that she really can outdance everyone else onstage. (Choreographer Jerry Mitchell helps by keeping the chorus...
Harvey Fierstein, in drag as Tracy's battleship mom (the role played by Divine in the movie), is Hairspray's showstopping centerpiece. But somewhere between his flouncy scenery chewing (with a chainsaw voice that is now painful to hear) and the familiar gags about uptight parents and butch gym teachers, Hairspray starts to lose its fizz. Making fun of the '50s and '60s has become so passe that this cartoon version gets old pretty fast. The smiley social commentary--Tracy meets the school's black kids in detention and discovers that they have rhythm--only makes the show's facetiousness...