aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Monday, July 16, 2007
Hairspray, the movie, no Little Shop
The movie version of the hit Broadway musical “Hairspray” is perfectly pleasant-I smiled to myself all the way through it-bu it’s not as exhilarating as the show. For subject like this-old dance crazes and po styles-what matters is not so much the actual past but how we feel about it, an onstage David Rockwell’s sets and William Ivey Long’s costumes distilled ou nostalgia for the candied years between Elvis’s early work and the arrival of th Beatles. Set in 1962, “Hairspray,” whose first incarnation was John Waters’ deadpan camp movie from 1988, celebrates a time when teen-agers, as a distinc consumer group with their own culture, were a fairly recent invention. The stag musical crystallized the euphoria of that period as naïvely eager commerce an irony-free fantasy; when the chubby young heroine, Tracy Turnblad, awoke i bed and sang “Good Morning, Baltimore,” she was surrounded by a pink sha carpet dotted with hair-spray cans and 45s, and the bouffant-and-beehive nuttines of her world was buoyed by affection. The movie is a lovefest, too, but, this time when Tracy (Nikki Blonsky) awakes, she jumps onto the streets of Baltimore an passes vermin, a drunk, and a creep. Later, she joins a civil-rights march that ha a confrontation with the police. Many people love movies because they mak sensuous contact with the surfaces of the world, but this material hardly cries ou for realism. “Hairspray” doesn’t need to be “opened up”; it needs to be freshly stylized for the screen.
The return of Xanadu to the Broadway stage - also reviewed in this week’s New Yorker, “so ridiculously brilliant, so lavish and sublime a confection that any set of adjectives you might come up with after a single viewing will more than likely be replaced by another set of ineffectual adjectives once you’ve seen the show a second or third time” (I wholeheartedly agree) - has a laugh line declaring 1980 the year that creativity and imagination fled the arts. In fact, the original Newton-John megabomb was so bad as to effectively kill off the movie musical for two decades.
Too bad, too, because 1986 saw the screen adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors. The last show to go from B-movie to stage-musical to movie-musical, Little Shop was a truly wonderful under appreciated gem. And a box office flop. That movie actually had some of what David Denby says he’d like to see in the new film release of Hairspray.
Here’s Ellen Greene singing Somewhere That’s Green from the movie:
SEE ALSO: Ellen sings the same song on stage.
