While watching the very funny, very entertaining Hairspray at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, I found myself thinking about how much things have changed here since 1962. That, by the way, is the year in which the events of this campy, kitschy musical take place, events that include the racial integration of Baltimore, Md., through the efforts of one 16-year-old overweight angel named Tracy Turnblad. As a packed house at TBPAC rooted for Tracy and her black friends Seaweed and Inez, I remembered that Tampa in the early '60s was still segregated, that the Kwik Chek on Grand Central Avenue had separate water fountains for "white" and "colored," that restaurants had separate bathrooms for black and white, and that no African Americans ever turned up on television commercials or in the Tribune's Sunday comics section (my favorite reading in those childhood days). Who in the Tampa of 1962 could have predicted that 40-odd years later a musical championing racial integration would pack a huge theater, that a crowd of 2,000 – most of them white – would roar their approval when black Motormouth Maybelle sang "I Know Where I've Been," when black Seaweed and white Penny Pingleton acknowledged their love for each other, or when Seaweed and Inez broke the color bar on The Corny Collins Show? Sure, racial equality still has a long way to go here, but the difference is, nonetheless, astonishing. Not one person but a large segment of the whole population has had a change of heart. It's enough to make a man an optimist.
And Hairspray, inspired by the 1988 John Waters movie of the same name, is enough to make you optimistic about Broadway musicals. It's not quite the perfect show – it's a little too hung up on surfaces to merit that epithet – but it's perfectly professional, perfectly designed, choreographed, directed. The story it tells may be a candy-coated wish-fulfillment – chunky loser becomes a TV star and wins the heart of local Elvis while managing to racially integrate Baltimore – but it's told with such panache, with so much good-natured humor, you can't help but relish every silly joke, costume and set piece. This is a show with over 30 characters, and each one of them is played by an ingratiating actor, from Keala Settle as big-hearted Tracy to John Pinette (in six shades of drag) as her mother Edna, from Susan Cella as the villainous Velma to Worth Williams as her evil daughter Amber. And this is a show that's been designed by the best – by costumer William Ivey Long and set-magician David Rockwell – with the result that there's pleasure to be had in every change of clothes or environment. True, the book by Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan isn't always laugh-out-loud funny, but at the least it'll keep you smiling ("We can all learn a lot from the mistakes of Debbie Reynolds"; "Gee, you're beautiful when you're unconscious"; "If we get any more white people in here, it'll be a suburb"). And Jerry Mitchell's choreography is out-and-out exciting, not least because it's performed so persuasively by everyone on stage. Add clever lyrics and catchy music and you've got the best musical to come to the Bay area since The Producers. It won't change your life, but it'll tickle – and refresh – your spirit.
The story it tells is about overweight Tracy, and her dream of starring on an American Bandstand-like show that's produced in her hometown of Baltimore. The show's producer, Velma Von Tussle, is trying to keep black-inflected music out of the broadcast and her vicious daughter Amber as the reigning TV princess. Although Tracy gets no encouragement from her launderer mother Edna, she auditions for the show and manages, with the help of a dance taught to her by African-American fellow student Seaweed, to get the job. Now she sets out to make a change in segregated Baltimore: she brings her white friends to a party given by Seaweed's imposing mother Motormouth Maybelle, and then resolves to get black teenagers dancing on The Corny Collins Show. Tracy and company end up in jail, and for a while it looks like all our teen heroine's aims – to integrate Baltimore, to be named Miss Teenage Hairspray, to win the love of Link Larkin – will remain unachieved. But a feelgood musical is a feelgood musical, and with her Mom and Dad behind her, Tracy turns out to be irresistible. Or, as the show's last song declares, "You Can't Stop The Beat" – of history, of justice, of big and righteous Tracy Turnblad. It's enough to make you want to put on a few pounds.
About the songs (music by Marc Shaiman, lyrics by Shaiman and Scott Wittman): they're all tuneful and clever, though there's not a single one of them that stands out as the show's anthem. Perhaps the most satisfying is "I Can Hear the Bells" – sung by Tracy when she has a hilarious vision of what life could be were she and Link Larkin joined in romance. But also very pleasing are "Welcome to the '60s," sung by a Supremes-like group called the Dynamites, and the witty "The Big Dollhouse," intoned by all the women in the House of Detention. Another element of the play that you'll enjoy is Paul Huntley's amusing hair design: one Tower of Babel after the next, each one reaching for the heavens. Jack O'Brien's direction couldn't be more kinetic; the Morsani Hall stage is so skillfully utilized, you'd think he imagined the show for just this space.
And that brings me back to thoughts of Tampa in 1962. Enjoy Hairspray, and while enjoying, try to remember life four decades ago. There really has been a change. There's no other way to interpret opening night's standing ovation. And there's no better reason to welcome this delightful, meaningful production.
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2005.
