Edna (Harvey Fierstein, center) and Wilbur Turnblad (Dick Latessa, right) gather with their daughter's friend Penny (Chandra Lee Schartz) to watch Tracy on a local TV dance show. Fierstein and Latessa bring a comic gravity to the freewheeling "Hairspray." Photos by Jane Kalinowsky. In "Hairspray," Tracy Turnblad (Katrina Rose Dideriksen) wakes up in bed singing "Good Morning Baltimore" in an opening number that highlights the '60s pop art of David Rockwell's set designs.

A song in "Hairspray" called "Big, Blonde and Beautiful" celebrates the joys of plus-sized gals who aren't afraid "to throw (their) weight around."

Beyond its face value, you can thank two of the actors singing the song -- Harvey Fierstein and Fran Jaye -- for throwing enough weight into the Broadway musical to keep it from floating away.

The Luxor's new production of the Broadway hit is so impeccably produced that it hits the wall only with the limits of the musical as written, one that tries so hard to be fun that it eventually forgets about everything except trying to be fun.

Fierstein, Jaye and Dick Latessa are welcome adult supervision for a youthful cast that could drift away on the wigs and frenetic dance maneuvers, like so many summer stock productions of "Bye Bye Birdie."

When you combine the happy, happy -- be happy, damn you! -- tone of the Broadway original with cuts that bring director Jack O'Brien's new Vegas version down to 90 minutes, you have almost literally a foot race, barrelling from song to song and pausing for only two momentary blackouts to let both the players and viewers catch their breaths.

As first told in John Waters' cult movie, Tracy Turnblad (Katrina Rose Dideriksen) is a stocky but vivacious teen in squalid 1962 Baltimore, whose only dream is to dance on the local version of "American Bandstand."

But Tracy achieves this dream so effortlessly that the musical's creators have a hard time throwing roadblocks into her path. Their response is to pit their Technicolor, "Birdie"-eye view of the early '60s against the reality of the era's racial tension. Not content to earn a place on the TV show, Tracy decides to get her new black friends on it, too. Integration is "the new frontier," she merrily chirps.

Tracy's friend Penny (Chandra Lee Schwartz) has a bit more hesitation about this brave new world, but only as she is diving into an interracial romance. Dideriksen and Schwartz are wonderful performers, but they can only do so much to make us think hanging with the hip black crowd is anything more than a modern, revisionist conceit of the writers.

Enter the grown-ups.

Jaye plays Motormouth Maybelle, who hosts the dance program on "Negro Day." She comes in near the end with the musical's one serious song, "I Know Where I've Been," delivering it with such sincere gravity that for a few minutes you're watching a civil rights drama.

Fierstein, in drag as Tracy's mother, Edna, and Latessa, as her father, bring their own comedic gravitas. An early scene of Edna ironing in her house frock is among the few to rekindle Waters' seedy comic aesthetic. These moments are crucial to one of the musical's few original notions, that the mother is the Cinderella character transformed by the daughter.

Moreover, Fierstein offers a lesson in how to work a line for more than is on the page. His crazy-funny voice starts with a bullfrog rasp when, say, he's wondering about finding Tracy a talent agent: "Who handled the Gabor sisters?" he asks. Then, shifting down into the basement with a whoosh that rumbles the subwoofers and raises the little hairs on your neck, he adds, "Well, who didn't?"

Fierstein and Latessa's duet, "(You're) Timeless to Me" is a lesson to younger viewers in the old-fashioned charms of musical theater before ABBA tunes. The same can be said of most all the songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, which back their verbal humor with a contagious drive.

David Rockwell's set design and William Ivey Long's costumes are packed with campy humor in their own right. The Luxor edition has been customized to play to the back rows of the clumsily large auditorium. There's a new set to display the band in the finale, and a jukebox-like proscenium frame for the stage.

One scene alone, the Turnblads' transformation into the cosmopolitan gals of "Welcome to the '60s," is such an elaborate plunge into pink-hued visual overkill that it will simultaneously serve as a reason why some people hate musicals and why others should check one out.

Of course, this is a musical settling into Las Vegas, where entertainment tradition decrees no limit of time and money shall be spent on eye candy and fleeting rushes of euphoria. And cutting most Broadway titles for the Strip subscribes to the cynical notion that a Vegas audience can't sit still for long because it wants to get back to those slot machines and pricey ultra lounges.

Hence, this "Hairspray" is shorn of three songs and shrinks the involvement of secondary characters, including Las Vegas headliner Susan Anton as the cartoony villain. That makes it a real feat for Schwartz and Austin Miller, as Tracy's love interest, to pull as much out of their stage time as they do.

The 90-minute count is dictated by union contracts rather than artistic considerations.

It's no loss to cut an extraneous song such as "Cooties," which merely belabors an already obvious finale. But I can think of at least one example where 91 or 92 minutes might be better than 90.

On Broadway, the "Dick Clark" character Corny Collins (Kevin Spirtas) gets a few lines of dialogue to argue with the corporate powers who resist integrating his TV show. Doing so makes him a semblance of a real character. In this version he's merely a singing TV host.

At least that's the way I remember the Broadway version, which I saw in December. To not be absolutely sure says a little about my untrustworthy memory but more, perhaps, about the ephemeral, quickly-dissipating nature of "Hairspray."