"Hairspray" lets the audience laugh at the over-the-top costumes, but director Jack O'Brien says the actors aren't allowed to. From left, Fran Jaye as Motormouth Maybelle, Harvey Fierstein as Edna Turnblad, Katrina Rose Dideriksen as Tracy Turnblad and Dick Latessa as Wilbur Turnblad. Photos by Jane Kalinowsky.
Link Larkin (Austin Miller) comforts Tracy Turnblad (Katrina Rose Dideriksen) in a scene from "Hairspray."
Prudy Pingleton (Susan Mosher) hugs her daughter Penny Lou (Chandra Lee Schwartz).
Hairspray" director Jack O'Brien never made it to the back row of the Neil Simon Theatre in New York. But one night last week, he and choreographer Jerry Mitchell watched an entire rehearsal of the hit musical from a far rear corner of the Luxor Theatre, "just to see what it was like."
"This is a new battlefield here, and I think we're all trying to figure out how it works," O'Brien says of the evolution to a new, compressed "Hairspray" on the Strip. The vantage point taught them a few things about "focus, clarity (and) articulation" in the spread-out, 1,526-seat theater.
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And the verdict?
"I think it's going to be great here."
The Vegas "Hairspray" -- now in previews for a formal opening on Wednesday -- is about 20 minutes shorter than the 2002 show that won eight Tony Awards. But it's otherwise straight from the source, reuniting the creative team and original stars.
For 12 weeks, Harvey Fierstein and Dick Latessa reprise their roles as the parents of a vivacious teen who sets out to integrate a TV dance show in 1962 Baltimore.
"I didn't want to be part of a touring company they dropped off," Fierstein says of the creative reunion that was a condition for returning to his cross-dressing role of Edna Turnblad.
And the shorter version was an attraction rather than a deterrent. "That's a worthy challenge," Fierstein said of the goal described to him as, "set(ting) off a bottle rocket. ... The curtain going up is the lighting of the rocket and it explodes."
"There's something airborne about the energy of this musical," O'Brien agrees. "The less frequently we have to touch down the more fun it is to the audience."
"Hairspray," first staged in Seattle, is one of several recent Broadway creations based on a nonmusical movie, this one a 1988 comedy by cult director John Waters.
Though Waters and his transvestite muse Divine had made some of the most willfully disgusting movies ever ("Pink Flamingos," "Female Trouble"), this was a PG tale based on Waters' memories of "The Buddy Deane Show," a Baltimore variation of Dick Clark's "American Bandstand."
The movie paired newcomer Ricki Lake as Tracy Turnblad with Divine in a surprisingly sweet character turn as her mother. The musical launched with songs from the team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who mined a similarly old-fashioned style from an unconventional source with their songs for "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut."
"Cross-dressing, racial integration and overeating have never seemed so wholesome, so American," Waters writes in the liner notes to the Broadway soundtrack to a musical "for outsiders of every persuasion."
Tracy (Katrina Rose Dideriksen) spends her young life pining to be on "The Corny Collins Show" and gets the attention of the TV host (Kevin Spirtas) despite objections about her body type from "the Council" of popular kids headed by the treacherous Amber Von Tussle (Katharine Leonard) and her mother, Velma (Susan Anton).
But Tracy doesn't stop there. She further riles up Amber and Velma by trying to get her new black friends on the regular broadcast instead of the occasional "Negro Day" -- the term used by the real Deane show, which ceased production in the wake of integration pressure in 1964.
"In 1961 you had the American dream at its most fully realized. Tract homes, all of that culture was at its height. It was a peaceful time," Fierstein notes. "Then you look at '62. ... It's the bubbling pot. By 1964 you had cities burning."
"We don't hit anybody over the head (with the message) but it's hard to extricate the serious underpinnings of the show which give it its ballast," O'Brien adds. "It allows the character of Motormouth (the mother of Tracy's black friend, played by Fran Jaye) to sing that great song in the second act ('I Know Where I've Been.') Without it, it would have the consistency of a Communion wafer, I think."
Pruning the show meant losing the second-act curtain-opener, "The Big Dollhouse," and Velma's song, "(The Legend of) Miss Baltimore Crabs." But O'Brien says he didn't want to cut "what I call the involvement quotient, your ability to get to know these people and subsequently care about them."
The director says there also came a time to reel in a cast that can get caught up in the energy of Mitchell's choreography.
"I was able to watch the effects of all that adrenalized excitement on people who are getting increasingly giddier, as opposed to increasingly more real. When I finally said we're going to play this seriously, it was a real wake-up call to everybody."
The secret to the show, he says, is that the audience -- even those in the far corners of the theater -- can relish the outrageous wigs and costumes, but the actors onstage must be oblivious.
"They have to be in a bell jar. They have to be in an atmosphere of total purity," he says. "They can't wink wink, nudge nudge. Because then they're satirists and we're not. We're playing this for keeps."
what: "Hairspray"
when: 7 p.m. today, Monday and Tuesday; 7 and 10 p.m. Saturday and Sunday
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Feb. 10, 2006
