Play DC: Hairspray

April 23, 2008 by Andrea  Send to a Friend

Big attitude, big hair, big women, and big voices made Hairspray at the Warner Theater last week a colossal success.

The unsinkable Tracy Turnblad (Brooklyn Pulver) booms onstage as the ultra-idealistic plus-size 1960’s bubblegum tween who dreams beyond her waistline and lands herself a spot on the Corny Collins television dance show. Tracy continues to squash social norms when she steals the heart of dreamy teenage-idol—Link (Taylor Frey)—from the classically mean pretty-girl Amber (Katie Donahue). If that weren’t enough, Tracy is also a young civil rights activist who breaks free from jail after organizing a non-violent integrated takeover of the segregated television dance party.

The energy that the ultra-rambunctious cast possesses and maintains throughout the course of the show is delightfully uncanny. Tracy and her teenybopper peers provide hilarious hormonal dynamism as they relentlessly (but surprisingly non-annoyingly) sing, dance, and squeal their way through their adolescent blunders. The best moments of Tuesday’s show came from the Turnblad husband and wife duo: Dan Ferretti as Wilbur—Tracy’s petite-sized father—and interim-drag queen Greg London who played the part of the Turnblad’s beefy matriarch, Edna. The couple’s improvisational banter left the actors laughing harder than the audience when London impulsively exclaimed, “You don’t even look Jewish”—to which Ferretti answered, “You can’t always tell.” London then nearly burst out of his girdle as he replied, “…oh, yes you can!” while he coyly reached around Ferretti’s front side to prove his point at the end of their romantic song and dance number, “(You’re) Timeless to Me.” Former Dreamgirl, Angela Birchett meanwhile provided an impressively solemn interlude with “I Know Where I’ve Been,” a powerful song that is equally applicable to any prolonged struggle for what is right—imagine a Dr. Martin Luther King speech sung by the patiently full-ranged and robust voice of a beautiful black diva.

The cast of Hairspray openly embraces all that is cheesy and cliché and cleverly infuses an often clever, but sometimes tacky script with talent and spontaneous wit. The result is a truly feel-good musical that’s an endlessly entertaining, endorphin-releasing calorie burner for actors and theatergoers alike.

HAIRSPRAY
Starring Brooklyn Pulver, Greg London, Jarret Mallon, Jacqueline Grabois and more. Music by Marc Shaiman, lyrics by Shaiman and Scott Whitman, book by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan. Directed by Matt Lenz. Presented by NETwork Presentations, LLC at the Warner Theater. On tour.

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