Caroline Eisman in Hairspray, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Jeremy Daniel.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Something has happened to the light-hold flexible Hairspray we’ve always known. It’s gone Ultra-Clutch.

In a world of chronic downsizing — of prospects, budgets, the polar ice cap … — there’s something reassuring, in theory, about the candy-coloured Broadway hit musical of 2003 that’s arrived with a big beehive of early ‘60s for the Jube stage. Hairspray is all about size large, in hair, in heart, in girth.

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I have to tell you that a sold-out opening night house Tuesday, who rose to their feet cheering, decisively will not agree with me here. But judging by this hard-driven, relentlessly brassy Broadway Across Canada production, the period piece musical (teased from the 1988 John Waters movie) that captivated us with its endearing bouffant combo of satirical and sweet, goofy and earnest, has lost something en route to 2023. Too much back-combing? Too much conditioner? Overheated blow dry? A dated ‘do?

For starters, the sound mix in Act I, at least on opening night, was so heavily band-forward it was pretty hard to figure out which character was singing onstage. Much less hear the Scott Wittman/ Marc Shaman lyrics, a shame since they’re cheeky and witty. The sound improved somewhat in Act II, but retained a nasty metallic sheen.

To look on the bright side, you can have no cavil about size. Size Large the production truly is, with a cast of nearly three dozen (and a band of six). The actors are a treat to look at, in William Ivey Long’s ‘60s costumes, all ice cream soda colours and argyle vests, re-created for the tour. And Jerry Mitchell’s choreography, reworked by Robbie Roby, reinvents the movement lexicon of the ‘60s, both its retro (white) comb-over and its capture of the forward-looking (Black) moves of the time. Which turns out to be a key narrative distinction.

“I got my own way of moving and I got my own voice,” as Seaweed (supple Josiah Rogers) and his sister Inez (Kaila Simone Crowder) tell us in the song Run and Tell. And plus-size radical Tracy Turnblad (Caroline Eiseman), up against the skinny white status quo, is the beneficiary of their example in her quest to be on TV and capture the fancy of heartthrob Link (Skyler Shields).

To return to the story, Tracy and her equally outsized mama Edna Turnblad, played by Greg Kalafatas (an actor of sturdy build, as per the tradition established by Divine and Harvey Fierstein), find themselves at a moment in history in Baltimore 1962 when social revolution is at hand. The local TV teen dance extravaganza, The Corny Collins Show, a take-off on Baltimore’s Buddy Deane Show, is looking for a replacement performer. Tracy pines to to be a Corny Collins dancer, and the secret of her success is her Black moves. So racial integration just makes perfect sense to her. And a mother-daughter team of outcasts-turned-ample activists is set in motion.

With some exceptions, guileless charm of the wide-eyed variety is in short supply in the well-lacquered production directed for the tour by Matt Lenz (Jack O’Brien was the original director). Performances are directed to dial up comic grimacing, double-takes, and mugging. And you’d be forgiven for wondering from time to time whether you might be watching a Hairspray parody.

Tracy, a repository of optimism, moves with a skip and a bounce — and here a certain tooth-gritting determination, as if her life (or at least her portfolio) depended on them. In this version she isn’t exactly the endearing, vulnerable heroine whose fortunes in romance and showbiz are a big part of your Hairspray investment.

Greg Kalafatas in Hairspray, Broadway Touring Production. Photo by Jeremy Daniel.

Edna, she of the “extra-large largesse,” tends to go directly for the laughs, winking at her own cross-gender casting. But Kalafatas’s performance did grow on me in the course of the evening. And Edna’s vaudevillian soft-shoe number with her husband Wilbur (the delightful Ralph Prentice Daniel), owner of the Har De Ha Hut joke shop, which dials back, or diverts, comic posturing in favour of a different kind of laughter, is a lot of fun, and something of a relief.

Josiah Rogers and Scarlett Jacques in Hairspray, Broadway Across Canada touring production. Photo by Jeremy Daniel.

There’s not much girl chemistry between Tracy and her nerdy BFF Penny (Scarlett Jacques). But the latter performance does land on comic moments without hammering them into the stage. Performances in smaller roles, like Penny’s bigoted mother or the school principal who doubles as the Corny Collins corporate sponsor, are grotesquely exaggerated, to remind us I guess that we’re watching a comedy in case we’ve blanked on that. The mother-daughter pair of villains “from the white side of the tracks,” Velma and Amber Von Tussle, are gamely played by Sarah Hayes and Caroline Portner.

Kudos to the Supremes-like trio who emerge from a poster mid-performance with sage advice — “doncha let nobody try to steal your fun/ ‘cause a little touch of lipstick never hurt no one” — and to Deidre Lang’s Motormouth Maybelle, who powerfully delivers the racial anthem I Know Where I’ve Been.

Speaking as we are of stealing your fun, You Can’t Stop The Beat, as the show’s signature number puts it (and Hairspray history has reinforced). But in this production, to me, the  the beat is a hammering.

REVIEW

Hairspray

Broadway Across Canada touring production

Created by: Marc Shaiman (music), Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (lyrics), Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan (book)

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca