Quotes of the Day

A new theater ritual: the customers settle into their seats just before curtain time and hear a disembodied voice that warns members of the audience not to take photographs ... or phone calls. At the Neil Simon Theatre on New York's 52nd Street, as folks settle in to see the sassy, savvy, snazzy new Broadway musical "Hairspray," the announcer has a gentler way of telling the crowd to behave. He notes that the show "takes place in 1962, a time before there were cellular phones and beepers..."

...and just about the time when Broadway ceased to matter as a thriving popular art form. The 50s were the musical's last semi-golden age, the last decade of shows that are still lodged in the popular memory. "Guys and Dolls," "The King and I," "The Pajama Game," "Damn Yankees," "Bells Are Ringing," "My Fair Lady," "West Side Story," "The Music Man," "Gypsy," "The Sound of Music" — these were vital works of popular art, all quickly made into big-time movies. Revivals? Who needed revivals to get people humming tunes from the shows they'd just seen? Each of these 50s classics featured songs that marched onto the Hit Parade and kept America singing into the first Age of Rock.

Then rock 'n roll, as it became the dominant form of pop culture, chiseled a chasm between the music heard in the theater and the music heard on the radio. Soaring Broadway ballads, dewy with emotion, were instant anachronisms. A few female singers did essay the occasional show tune: Aretha Franklin did a rousing "Are You Sure" from "The Unsinkable Molly Brown," and Ketty Lester turned "Once Upon a Time" into the last frail breath of remembered ardor. But these thrushes were crowded out of the Top 40 by jail-bait divas like Rosie Hamlin ("Angel Baby"), Little Peggy March ("I Will Follow Him") and Lesley Gore ("It's My Party"), and by the teen girl groups. Many of the anthems they sang, of suicidal angst or jolting joy, were written by other teenagers who worked in the Brill Building, smack in the heart of the musical-theater district that their music had made obsolescent.

Obsolescent then; obsolete 40 years later. The Broadway musical has lived so long in the past it's a wonder it has any life at all. Producers pick creaky shows to revive, hoping audiences can be separated from their $100 bills by the lure of ancient songs and what can pass for the old innocence. Composers choose a remote temporal setting partly because everyone else does, partly because the distant past accommodates their quaint or strained lyric styles; Broadway hasn't sung in a modern pop idiom for almost a half-century. The Street can't decide whether it wants to be a museum or a mausoleum.

New? Who needs new? Of the 16 musicals now playing in midtown Manhattan theaters, three are set in the 1920s ("Cabaret," "Chicago, "Thoroughly Modern Millie"), three in the 1930s ("42nd Street," "Oklahoma!", "The Boys from Syracuse"), and three, mon Dieu!, in 18th or 19th century France ("Beauty and the Beast," "Les Misérables," "The Phantom of the Opera"). Broadway tourists can visit ancient Egypt ("Aida) or Fairy Tale Land ("Into the Woods"). But it's tough to find either a musical that takes place in the here and now — "Urinetown" is a city of the future that looks like Pittsburgh in the Depression — or one that was written in the last five years: just four, if you count "The Producers," three of whose favorite songs come from a 1968 movie.

THE NEW "PRODUCERS"?

"The Producers" was the musical theater's last megahit. The Nathan Lane starrer, which opened in April 2001, was also the first show in ages to break the unwritten 20-year rule for Broadway shows: be dramatic, tragic if possible, and always brown. Mel Brooks, who wrote the score and co-wrote the libretto from his fondly-recalled old film, reminded theatergoers that there used to be something, a very agreeable thing, called "musical comedy" — emphasis on the comedy. Audiences devoured "The Producers" like the first spoonful of chocolate sundae after Yom Kippur. If the show wasn't quite the laugh-till-you-break-in-half enterprise that critics indicated, it proved that modern musicals could make you feel something besides righteous and rotten. Happy, for example.

Watching the long queues in front of the St. James Theatre, Broadway entrepreneurs had an epiphany: sad was out, glad was in. From now on, instead of looking for another sullen, finger-wagging faux-opera, they would try to find "the next ‘Producers'." Sure enough, the ABBA's greatest-hits medley "Mamma Mia!" arrived and became the top new tourist attraction. It and "The Producers" have both been grossing $1 million or more a week (the golden number for a Broadway show) ever since. "Thoroughly Modern Millie," the Julie Andrews musical without Julie Andrews, followed and won the Tony for best musical. Maybe the judges didn't want to give it to a show called "Urinetown," the critical hit that is much perkier, less rancid than its title suggests; it's a musical comedy in agitprop drag. And now comes "Hairspray."

Long before the show got to New York, when it was trying out in Seattle, the word got around about "Hairspray." And the word was the publicists' favorite four-letter one: buzz. Since its August 22nd opening, to enthusiastic reviews, "Hairspray" — based on John Waters' 1988 film about the attempts of one chunky girl to integrate a "Bandstand"-like TV dance party in Baltimore — has fulfilled its box-office promise. Last week it was one of two Broadway musicals playing to capacity audiences (the other was "Mamma Mia!").

If not for the relatively intimate size of the Neil Simon, "Hairspray" would be hitting the million-dollar mark. But don't fret for the show's backers. The cast has no above-the-title names — the most prominent figure is Harvey Fierstein, the bullfrog-voiced actor who goes into drag to play the heroine's oversize mother, and whose previous Broadway performance (in his 1987 comedy "Safe Sex") lasted all of one week — so ticket sales aren't siphoned into star salaries. And the show is peddling CDs, T shirts and geegaws galore. At Bloomingdale's, in its 59th Street store and other locations, you will find "Hairspray" boutiques festooned with period clothes, some for full-figured gals. In a Village Voice column, Lynn Yeager noted that there was, "for the first time in memory, a plump mannequin in the window of Bloomie's, with falsies as prominent as Harvey Fierstein's."

THE HAIRHOPPER'S BALL

Both versions of "Hairspray" have the same plot. Goes like this:

It's 1962 in Baltimore, the self-proclaimed Hairdo Capital of the World. On Corny Collins' afternoon rock 'n roll show, white teenagers perform all the latest dances and are local heroes to every adolescent. Chief among these starlets is Amber Von Tussle, a snooty princess whose mom, Miss Soft Crab of 1945, pours all her ambition into Amber. Every afternoon the pouty miss must practice the cha-cha and the Mashed Potato under Mom's eagle eye. "I want you to get more close-ups on that show," Mom admonishes, "or I'm sending you to Catholic school!" Eeuuuu!

Amber soon finds she has a rival: Tracy Turnblad, who is plump, perky and, pound for bouffanted pound, the snappiest Caucasian dancer in town. Soon this out-of-nowhere "hairhopper" (someone who defines her personality by the startling size and shape of her 'do) is outshining Amber on TV, modeling dresses for a full-figure salon called the Hefty Hideaway and causing a rumpus by insisting that black teenagers be allowed to dance along with whites on Corny's show. Till now African-Americans have been offered only a once-a-month "Negro Day," totally segregated — a token for the "Soul Train."

Stardom proves no cinch for Tracy. The school authorities declare that our heroine's hairdo is a "hair-don't" and exile her to the special ed class. She and Link Larkin, her "common-law boyfriend," are ostracized from their keen teen group. Her best friend, Penny Pingleton, is denounced as a "checkerboard chick" for dating a black student. True to its early-60s milieu, the film climaxes in demonstrations, violent disputes, jail time for the civil-rights marchers. And (this is a fantasy, folks) they danced happily ever after.

Waters based his script on memories of "The Buddy Deane Show," a Baltimore staple that had entranced the young style maven. "I loved it," Waters recently told Blake Green of Newsday. "They [the dancers] were my imaginary friends. I used to watch the show and draw exaggerated hairdos and make up fictitious biographies for all of them. I even danced on the show — twice, both times the dirty boogie. Then I smoked pot and that was all over. My friends radically changed. No more Buddy Deane."

The writer-director, who had made his rep with no-budget comedies about the filthiest people south of the Mason-Dixon line, for once gave his movie an upbeat conclusion that real life couldn't match. "The Buddy Deane Show" never was integrated; it ended its run in the mid-60s as white-bread as always, and staler than ever. By this time "Bandstand" had moved from its original location in Philadelphia (100 miles north of Baltimore) to Los Angeles, where the kids had better bodies and deeper tans, and even the white-ethnic tinge of the teen dancers disappeared into generic good looks. Frankie Avalon went west and turned into Troy Donahue.

For his story about integration, Waters smartly miscegenated two irreconcilable film genres: the message movie and the teen flick, or Sam Arkoff meets Stanley Kramer. To update the genre to the 80s, it was John Waters doing John Hughes, but with his own road map. No Molly Ringwald needed; Ricki Lake, in her motion picture debut as Tracy, is the dream image of every girl who has ever craved that eighth Twinkie. No teen realism here, just a romp through the pastel homes and matching mother-daughter outfits of a more naive era. No anxious parental conflict, at least when Tracy's mom is played by Divine, the 300-lb. actor who always looks the height of fashion in a housedress (it was the drag diva's seventh and last Waters film; he died a month after the movie was released).

Baltimore, for which Waters is still the perverse poet laureate, never looked lovelier. Watch the moon shimmer in a puddle, as a rat crawls through it. See Tracy triumphant, in her pink roach-patterned evening gown. See "Hairspray" too, on a double DVD (with "Pecker") that features Waters' ever-fabulous commentary. It's light and airy, but it will stick around: the first aerosol movie.

THE NEW "PRODUCERS"!

It turns out that "Hairspray" really is "The Producers" in so many ways. Let me count them.

Way 1: It's inspired by a cult comedy from a writer-director at least as famous for his talk-show and other extracurricular appearances as for his movies.

Way 2: It's a genuine hit that people want to see and, after they've paid the $100 a ticket, don't feel robbed.

Way 3: It takes a serious historical subject (your integration, your Nazis) and dolls it up beyond all pretense and offense.

Way 4: It has been directed and choreographed (by, respectively, Jack O'Brien and Jerry Mitchell) with a zestful respect for the tone of the piece. There's as much sassy humor in the actors' movements as in their dialogue.

Way 5: It's a bright show, literally: the color scheme of the sets (by architect David Rockwell) and costumes (William Ivey Long) is so cheerful and deliciously gaudy that you can not only like them, you can practically lick them.

Way 6: The performances are broad — well, beyond broad: zaftig — but mostly precise. The actors give the impression this is what they love doing, that they've been rehearsing this stuff in front of their mirrors since they were kids and, praise be, someone finally asked them to do it in public.

Way 7: It's stuffed to the corners with funny images (the rat that scampers across the stage) and nice supporting performances. My early pick for stage stardom is Danelle Eugenia Wilson as Little Inez, younger sister of the show's black male lead; Wilson has fabulous flying feet and a sweet, budding charisma. And my secret chorine is Jennifer Gambatese, in the tiny role of Brenda, the teen who has to leave the show because she's pregnant (by Corky, it's suggested). Gambatese, who then sticks around to add heft and sparkle to the chorus, has the looks of a fleshed-out Parker Posey and that extra bit of juice in her steps. She also hits — on the button she's as cute as — the highest note at the climax of the show's title song.

Way 8: If the evening has a fault, it's one it shares with "The Producer": this is an entertainment that knows exactly how fetching it is. The show is a little too sure of the pleasure it expects to give: virtually every song has a built-in encore. In high school, "Hairspray" would have been voted The Most Likely to Think It's the Most Likely to Succeed. The show is Amber pretending to be Tracy.

Way 9: It has a book (by Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan) full of smart repartee, delivered at a brisk pace that forces listeners to swallow their laughter so they can hear the next line.

"WE DO MUSICALS!"

Here's "Hairspray," without the songs (for now) and with a hint of the verbal wit:

At the start, Tracy (Marissa Jaret Winokur) is trapped at home, watching "The Corky Collins Show" with her friend Penny Pingleton (Kerry Butler). Fat Mama Edna (Fierstein) wants to be alone in her misery; she growls to Penny, "Go tell your mother she wants you." Edna is married to medium-size Wilbur (Dick Latessa), who runs the local joke shop; his ambition is to "keep the air from leaking out of my sofa-size Whoopee Cushion." The goal Edna mentions has the same working-class practicality about it: she wants to "find a way to get blood out of car upholstery." But she has a loftier, more furtive dream: to be the Oleg Cassini of the dietally-challenged. "I used to design my own clothes," she muses wistfully, "till I wandered beyond the boundary of the last McCall's pattern size."

Over the objections of Edna, who is uncomfortable in her own capacious flesh and believes that her daughter will be rejected by the snobby TV kids, Tracy answers a "Corky Collins" open call for dancers when Brenda is exiled. She arrives late at the TV station — "I thought we'd never get here! Darn bus wreck..." — and is grilled by the Council of Corky regulars. Tracy's spunk and terp-ability appeal to Collins (Clarke Thorell), who has the radical notion that "It's time we put kids on the show who look like the kids who watch the show." (Jerry Springer later took that idea and honed it to putting people on his show who were even dumber, uglier and more deranged than the people who watched it.) But the show's producer, Velma Von Tussle (Linda Hart), insists on keeping the cast prim and pretty, with her blond daughter Amber (Laura Bell Bundy) as the Shrewish American Princess and hunky Link Larkin (Matthew Morrison) as her consort.

Tracy's hairdo, now growing like a monster fungus in an AIP horror movie, has landed her and Penny in Special Ed., the high school gulag for misfits of all races, bad attitudes and personal liabilities. (Tracy: "Whaddaya do in Special Ed.?" Nerds: "We do musicals!") The class also imprisons some of the black kids, including Seaweed J. Stubbs (Corey Reynolds), for whom Penny develops an immediate and unquenchable letch. From nine to three, Tracy tries to wriggle from the confines of Special Ed.; then she's off to Corky's, to dance her plus-size girdle off.

Soon Tracy is the most popular gal on the dance floor. Wait a minute, Amber thinks, that's my job, and squalls, with a lovely petulance, "Everybody, stop liking her!" But everybody can't stop. Link, the divoonest guy in town, feels a strange urge to be with the fat girl. Even Edna is impressed by Tracy's new radiance: "If I'd known you were gonna get on the show, I never woulda said don't do it." Tracy also gets endorsements. At Mr. Pinky's Hefty Hideaway, Mr. P. wants Tracy to be the shop's "exclusive spokesperson and fashion effigy." In retaliation, Amber spreads vile calumny about the Special Ed. creature who's stealing her boyfriend. "Tracy is loose and she's retarded," Amber hisses. "She's fast AND she's slow." Our heroine responds to our villainess: "You have acne of the soul!"

Seaweed takes Penny and Tracy to meet his mom, Motormouth Maybelle (Mary Bond Davis), who hosts the once-a-month Negro Day on Corky's show and runs a record store on the dark side of town. The two nice white chicks love the cluttered store's music, its warmth and perceived danger. (Tracy: "This is so Afro-tastic!") In two shakes, Link shows up, and Edna and Wilbur. The place is crawling with Caucasians! A black girl mutters, "If we get any more white people in here, it'll be a suburb."

Enlightened and emboldened, Tracy leads picketers against Corky's all-white show. All the ladies are arrested and land in the custody of a nasty prison matron ("Think of me as a mother — who eats her young"). The Von Tussles get sprung because Amber once had done a, let's call it a favor for the governor. Tracy is aghast, as any good Democrat would be, in 1962 or 2000: "Manipulating the judicial system just to win a contest is unethical!" Tracy, alone in her cell, is visited by the now lovestruck Link. "You look beautiful!" he rhapsodizes, and she replies, "It must be the low-watt institutional lighting." Is the lighting too low for her to see the adoration sparkling in his soul? Then he must voice it: "I know a palooka like me in unworthy of a groundbreaking extremist like you." As prison scenes go, this one is more noble than "Les Miz," "Parade" and "Kiss of the Spider Woman'" put together.

The show's book has a few showbiz references, both of its period (Penny, quoting Louise from "Gypsy," plaintively states, ""I'm a pretty girl, Mama!") and out of it (Amber gets anointed Miss Hairspray and, when Tracy and her supporters demand the crown on her head, proclaims in her most menacing Charlton Heston fashion, "You'll have to rip it from my cold dead hands"). But most of the writing has a fidelity to character comedy that kept me smiling as I was typing these now-familiar snatches of dialogue. It also tucks a moral inside: not the 60s dream of racial justice but the very-now notion that the You inside you is faaaabulous. For Penny and Seaweed: black and white is better than gray. For Tracy and Edna: Fat is Phat, baby!

O'Donnell and Meehan: they do musical comedy.

"WUH. UH. OH."

Waters' "Hairspray" was as much tribute to the early 60s as parody of it. He loved the old songs, loved the dances that accompanied them — the Madison, the Twist, the Continental, the Fly, the Roach — and in his film reproduced a dozen of them, with an archaeologist's fidelity. For the Broadway version Waters is listed as "consultant"; he claims he was much too bossy ever to collaborate. He also knew that the shoe would have "new" songs; the pastiche conceit embraced not only the ransacking of tacky 50s-60s modes of decor, coiffure and couture but the rephrasing of less-than-classic Brill Building song styles.

Marc Shaiman, the show's composer (and lyricist, with his partner Scott Wittman), built an exceptional body of work as arranger of pop standards for Bette Midler. He also collaborated with Trey Parker on the settings for the wonderfully knowledgeable songs in "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut." "Hairspray" is his first "original" score. I'm sorry I have to put quote marks around the adjectives modifying his work here, but the score is not a general evocation of first-decade rock 'n roll, as "Grease" so famously was and "The Rocky Horror Show" so brilliantly. Almost all the Shaiman songs are canny paraphrases of songs that children of a certain age still find rattling around in their memorial juke boxes.

The first four sounds heard — a drum slamming, "Bum. Ba-bum. Pow!" with the clock of castanets on the fourth beat — tell the audience that the music aims directly at pastiche, for those are the first four notes of "Be My Baby," the Jeff Barry-Ellie Greenwich song from which producer Phil Spector and arranger Jack Nitzsche created a sonic masterpiece for the Ronettes. (Martin Scorsese recognized the power of this opening: he used it at the start of "Mean Streets.") A few bars later, the first syllables uttered in the show — a cutting "Wuh. Uh. Oh." for the song "Good Morning Baltimore" — cue the audience to the tone and intent. Winokur, with a voice that shouts High School of the Performing Arts in its "Fame" years, gives the "Oh" that diphthong that identifies anyone from Baltimore (or from Philadelphia, South Jersey or Delaware; it's a widespread contagion from which many of us are not cured).

Most of the songs evoke, or quote, old favorites. "The Nicest Kids in Town" echoes both "The Peppermint Twist" and "Mony Mony," cutely tweaked to "Money money!" The sextet "Mama I'm a Big Girl Now" is the Crystals' "He's Sure the Boy I Love" (the saxophones primmer than Nino Tempo's on the Spector singles) with a twist of "Twist and Shout." Tracy's ballad "I Can Hear the Bells" summons the ghosts of white-girl singers and the ultimate white-girl tribute song, Neil Sedaka's "Calendar Girl"; instead of the months counted off, we hear "Round One... Round Two..." The bluesy "It Takes Two" borrows the chord pattern from "Sea of Love" and the mood of Barbara Lynn's "You'll Lose a Good Thing" (a Waters favorite oldie, used in the movie). There's a black-girl-group uptempo number, "Welcome to the '60s," that echoes "Heat Wave" and other Martha and the Vandellas tunes.

(The one slightly naughty song — the only tune that conjures up the joyous anarchy of early John Waters movies — is not in the show. I suspect that someone urged cutting it because the more sensitive souls in the audience thought it too ugly to be funny. It is on the CD, though, hiding 11 seconds after the end of the final song. "Blood on the Pavement" is a parody of 50s-60s public-service jingles and is delivered with a perky confidence that makes the message ever so much more ghoulish. Just a few lines, for the curious: "Don't drink and drive, please keep your head,/ Or come Graduation Day, you'll be dead.")

Shaiman has written a few generic Broadway tunes, in the High Generic mode — simple, singable, reverberative, just like Brooks' songs for "The Producers." And toward the end of the show he seems to realize he's run out of early-60s musical signatures to filch from. So in the last two songs he steals from 70s retro-rock. "Cooties" is nothing but Steve Martin's "King Tut." The finale, which brings the entire female company together to sing "You Can't Stop the Beat," begins as yet another Spector classic, "River Deep Mountain High," the raids pretty much the entire oeuvre of Jim Steinman, of Meat Loaf notoriety.

This last number, I confess, has my heart. It's the cut I play over and over, at lease-breaking volume, and whose lyrics I copied so I could sing along. It's where the show's spirit finally shouts, after two-and-a-half-hours of clever smiling. It's the song that elevates, levitates, rejuvenates the Hairspray" audience and keeps them jumping through the curtain calls and inevitable encores. It's where rock'n roll could have gone, or should have stayed. It lets you sing along with the "Hairspray" sisterhood. And, since it's got a great beat, you can dance to it.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss gets those happy feet at Broadway's latest retro-musical hit