Hairspray
Musicals
Must Read: on Aug. 09, 2009
Plot summary
May 3, 1962. Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky), a cheerful, rotund high school student living in Baltimore, Maryland steps out of her apartment ("Good Morning Baltimore") and endures a day’s worth of school before she and her best friend Penny Pingleton (Amanda Bynes) can watch their favorite TV show, The Corny Collins Show, a teen dance show broadcast from Baltimore’s station WYZT ("The Nicest Kids in Town").
The teenagers featured on the show attend Tracy and Penny's school, among them the arrogant and wealthy Amber Von Tussle (Brittany Snow) and her boyfriend Link Larkin (Zac Efron), the lead male dancer on the show. Amber’s mother, Velma (Michelle Pfeiffer) manages WYZT and goes out of her way to make sure Amber is featured and that The Corny Collins Show remains a racially segregated program. Corny Collins (James Marsden) and his Council Members are white; black kids are only allowed on the show on "Negro Day", held the last Tuesday of each month and hosted by R&B disc jockey Motormouth Maybelle (Queen Latifah), who owns a record shop.
Tracy's reclusive mother Edna (John Travolta) and Penny's strict mother Prudy (Allison Janney) disapprove of their daughters' fascination with the program; Tracy's father, Wilbur (Christopher Walken), a joke-shop proprietor, is more lenient. One day, Corny Collins announces that a Council Member is going on a leave of absence, and that auditions for a replacement will be held the next morning during school hours ("It Takes Two"). When Tracy attends, Velma rejects her at the audition for being overweight and supportive of integration ("(The Legend of) Miss Baltimore Crabs"). Tracy is sent to detention by Miss Wimsey (Jayne Eastwood) for skipping school, where she learns that the “Negro Day” kids practice their dances in the detention hall. Tracy befriends the students' best dancer, Motormouth Maybelle's son Seaweed (Elijah Kelley), who teaches Tracy several dance moves. As Tracy leaves detention, she accidentally bumps into Link and dreams of a life with him ("I Can Hear the Bells"). At a record hop, Tracy’s moves attract the attention of Corny Collins ("Ladies' Choice") and he appoints her to the Council ("The Nicest Kids in Town (Reprise)").
Tracy becomes one of Corny's most popular Council Members. This threatens Amber's chances of winning the show's yearly "Miss Teenage Hairspray" pageant ("The New Girl in Town") and her relationship with Link, as he grows fonder of Tracy. Mr. Pinky (Jerry Stiller), a slightly off-centered salesman, suggests that Tracy be the spokesgirl for his Hefty Hideaway boutique. Tracy convinces Edna to accompany her to the Hefty Hideaway and act as her agent, and in the process ends her mother's agoraphobia ("Welcome to the 60’s").
At school Tracy introduces Seaweed to Penny, where the two are instantly attracted to one another. One afternoon, Amber arranges for Tracy to be sent to detention.. Link follows by saying a rude word to Mr. Flak (George King). Seaweed invites the girls and Link to follow him and his sister Little Inez (Taylor Parks) to a platter party at Motormouth Maybelle's record shop ("Run and Tell That"). When Edna finds Tracy at the shop she tries to take her home, until Maybelle convinces her to stay and makes Edna more proud of her image ("Big, Blonde and Beautiful"). Maybelle informs everyone that Velma has canceled "Negro Day". Tracy suggests that Maybelle and the others stage a protest march, which they plan for the next afternoon, a day before the "Miss Teenage Hairspray" pageant. Realizing that he has a chance at stardom by singing at the pageant, Link does not attend the demonstration, disappointing Tracy. After the party, Edna goes to Wilbur's shop to flirt with him. Velma gets there first and unsuccessfully tries to seduce Wilbur ("Big, Blonde and Beautiful (Reprise)"). Edna arrives and accuses Wilbur of infidelity. Edna, out of hatred for Velma, forbids Tracy from being on the show. Wilbur and Edna reconcile ("(You’re) Timeless to Me").
The next morning, Tracy sneaks out of the house to join the protest ("I Know Where I’ve Been"), which comes to a halt at a police roadblock set up by Velma. The protesters are arrested, but Tracy runs to the Pingletons, where Penny hides her in a fallout shelter. Prudy catches Tracy and calls the police before tying Penny to her bed. Seaweed and his friends, having been bailed out by Wilbur, help Tracy and Penny escape. Meanwhile, Link visits Tracy’s house to look for her and realizes that he loves her. Seaweed and Penny also acknowledge their love during the escape from her house ("Without Love").
With the pageant underway ("(It’s) Hairspray"), Velma places police officers around WYZT to stop Tracy. She also changes the pageant tallies so Amber is guaranteed to win. Penny arrives at the pageant with Edna "incognito", while Wilbur, Seaweed, and the Negro Day kids help Tracy infiltrate the studio in time to participate in the Miss Teenage Hairspray dance contest. Link breaks away from Amber to dance with Tracy; later, he pulls Little Inez, who has just arrived at WYZT with Maybelle, to the stage to dance in the pageant.
Little Inez receives the most votes and wins the pageant, officially integrating The Corny Collins Show. Velma loudly declares her frustration, informing her daughter of the tally-switching scheme. Unknown to Velma, Edna and Wilbur have turned a camera on her, and Velma's outburst is broadcast on the air, causing her to be fired from the program. Meanwhile, The Corny Collins Show set explodes into a celebration as Tracy and Link cement their love with a kiss ("You Can’t Stop the Beat").
Source: taken on Aug. 07, 2009
Movie Review
Teenagers in Love and a Mom in Drag in the '60s
By A. O. SCOTT July 19, 2007
That “Hairspray” is good-hearted is no surprise. Adam Shankman’s film, lovingly adapted from the Broadway musical, preserves the inclusive, celebratory spirit of John Waters’s 1988 movie, in which bigger-boned, darker-skinned and otherwise different folk take exuberant revenge on the bigots and the squares who conspire to keep them down. The surprise may be that this “Hairspray,” stuffed with shiny showstoppers, Kennedy-era Baltimore beehives and a heavily padded John Travolta in drag, is actually good.
Appropriately enough for a movie with such a democratic sensibility, there is plenty of credit to go around. Mr. Shankman, drawing on long experience as a choreographer, avoids the kind of vulgar overstatement that so often turns the joy of live musical theater into torment at the multiplex. The songs, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, are usually adequate, occasionally inspired and only rarely inane. And they are sung with impeccable diction and unimpeachable conviction by a lively young cast that includes Nikki Blonsky, Amanda Bynes, Zac Efron and the phenomenally talented Elijah Kelley.
Of course there are better-known, more-seasoned performers on hand as well, notably Queen Latifah, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken and Mr. Travolta. But “Hairspray” is fundamentally a story about being young — about the triumph of youth culture, about the optimistic, possibly dated belief that the future will improve on the present — and its heart is very much with its teenage heroes and the fresh-faced actors who play them.
Ms. Blonsky, a ball of happy, mischievous energy, is Tracy Turnblad, a hefty Baltimore high school student whose dream is to dance with the city’s most telegenic teeny-boppers on “The Corny Collins Show.” Ms. Bynes plays Penny Pingleton, Tracy’s timid best friend, whose prim mother (Allison Janney) won’t even let Penny watch the show, much less appear on it. Mrs. Pingleton can scarcely imagine that her daughter will eventually fall for Seaweed (Mr. Kelley), part of a group of black kids whom Tracy befriends in the detention hall after school.
As Penny and Seaweed test the taboo against interracial romance, Tracy and Link Larkin (Mr. Efron), a “Corny Collins” dreamboat, take on the tyranny of slenderness. That “Hairspray” cheerfully conflates racial prejudice with fat-phobia is the measure of its guileless, deliberately simplified politics. Upholding both forms of discrimination is Velma Von Tussle (Ms. Pfeiffer), a television station executive who uses “The Corny Collins Show” — against the wishes of Corny (James Marsden) himself — as a way of maintaining the color line and promoting the celebrity of her blond, smiley daughter, Amber (Brittany Snow).
“Hairspray” does not seriously propose that Tracy and her new African-American friends face equivalent forms of injustice. But it does make the solidarity between them feel like an utterly natural, intuitive response to the meanness and arrogance of their common enemies. “Welcome to the ’60s,” Tracy sings to her mother, conjuring up the New Frontier hopefulness of that decade’s early years rather than the violence and paranoia of its denouement.
In freezing history at a moment of high possibility — a moment whose glorious popular culture encompasses “West Side Story” and the Twist, early Motown and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound — “Hairspray” is at once knowingly corny and unabashedly utopian. On “The Corny Collins Show” Seaweed and his friends are relegated to a once-a-month Negro Day, presided over by Motormouth Maybelle (Queen Latifah). Tracy envisions a future when, as she puts it, “every day is Negro Day.”
What is missing from “Hairspray” is anything beyond the faintest whisper of camp. The original “Hairspray” may have been Mr. Waters’s most wholesome, least naughty film, but there was no containing the volcanic audacity of Divine, who created the role of Edna Turnblad. Divine, who was born Harris Glen Milstead and who died shortly after the first “Hairspray” was released, belonged to an era when drag performance still carried more than a touch of the louche and the dangerous, and was one of the artists who helped push it into the cultural mainstream.
Perhaps wisely Mr. Travolta does not try to duplicate the outsize, deliberately grotesque theatricality of Divine’s performance or to mimic the Mermanesque extravagance of Harvey Fierstein’s Broadway turn, choosing instead to tackle the role of Edna as an acting challenge. The odd result is that she becomes the most realistic, least stereotypical character in the film, and the only one who speaks in a recognizable (if not always convincing) Baltimore accent. (“Ahm tryna orn,” she complains when she’s trying to iron.)
A shy, unsophisticated, working-class woman, Edna is ashamed of her physical size even as she seems to hide inside it, as if seeking protection from the noise and indignity of the world outside. It is Tracy who pulls her out of her shell, and without entirely letting go of Edna’s timidity, Mr. Travolta explores the exhibitionistic and sensual sides of her personality.
Mr. Walken’s gallantry in the role of Edna’s devoted husband, Wilbur, is unforced and disarmingly sincere, and their duet, “(You’re) Timeless to Me,” is one of the film’s musical high points. Another is “Without Love,” in which the two young couples express their yearning with the help of some ingenious and amusing special effects.
There are, to be sure, less thrilling moments, and stretches in which the pacing falters. But the overall mood of “Hairspray” is so joyful, so full of unforced enthusiasm, that only the most ferocious cynic could resist it. It imagines a world where no one is an outsider and no one is a square, and invites everyone in. How can you refuse?
Source: taken on Aug. 07, 2009
Memorable quotes for Hairspray
Motormouth Maybelle: [watching Edna walk in] If we get any more white people in here, this is gonna be a suburb.
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Motormouth Maybelle: Well, looks like y'all took a step outta bounds.
[to Seaweed]
Motormouth Maybelle: Who've we got here?
Seaweed: Mom, I want you to meet my new friends. This here is Link, Tracy Turnblad...
Tracy Turnblad: [interrupts] This is just so afro-tastic!
Seaweed: And this young lady right here, is Penny Pingleton.
Penny Pingleton: I'm very pleased and scared to be here.
Motormouth Maybelle: Now, honey, we got more reason to be scared on your street.
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Edna Turnblad: Imagine! My little girl... regular, at last.
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Link Larkin: I was just at home, practicing my new twist on The Twist, when I overheard it on the news. I can't believe Tracy savagely bludgeoned an Eagle Scout. That's just not like her.
Edna Turnblad: But it's not true! I was there! He didn't even bleed.
Link Larkin: I shoulda been there, beside her. I can't sleep. I can't eat...
Edna Turnblad: You can't eat? Well, come on in and worry with us. I'll make you some pork.
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Amber von Tussel: [on the phone with Edna, disguising her voice] My name is Mike.
Edna Turnblad: [off-camera] Mike?
Amber von Tussel: Yes, Mike.
Edna Turnblad: Mike who?
Amber von Tussel: [slips back into her normal voice] It's MIKE!
[catches herself, coughs]
Amber von Tussel: Anyway... I'm calling because I have some information about your daughter's whereabouts.
Edna Turnblad: What?
Amber von Tussel: Right now, as we speak, your daughter has entered a hotbed of moral... turpentine.
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Tracy Turnblad: I'm a bad, bad girl who needs to be punished.
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Edna Turnblad: [singing] You can't stop my happiness, 'cuz I like the way I am. And you just can't stop my knife and fork when I see a Christmas ham! And if you don't like the way I look, then I just don't give a damn!
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Penny Pingleton: [after Tracy is rejected by Velma and the Council Members] I think they secretly liked you.
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Penny Pingleton: [looks into the camera] I am now a checkerboard chick!
[grabs Seaweed and kisses him passionately]
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Edna Turnblad: Would you keep that racket down? I'm trying to iron, here!
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Tracy Turnblad: Negro Day's the best! I wish every day were Negro Day!
Seaweed: At our house... it is.
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Seaweed: My mom's havin' a platter party tonight. Y'all wanna come check it out?
Tracy Turnblad: Now?
Penny Pingleton: Would you mind if I, too, checked it out? I've never been to North Avenue before.
Link Larkin: Uh... well, would it be safe, you know... for us?
Seaweed: Calm down, cracker boy, it's cool.
Penny Pingleton: Wow! Being invited places by colored people!
Tracy Turnblad: It feels so hip!
Seaweed: I'm glad y'all feel that way, 'cause, uh, not many people do.
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Tracy Turnblad: I think I've kind of been in a bubble... thinking that fairness was gonna just happen. It's not. People like me are gonna have to get up off their fathers' laps and go out and fight for it.
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Wilbur Turnblad: [to Tracy] This is America, babe, you gotta think big to be big.
Edna Turnblad: Big ain't the problem in this family, Wilbur.
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Edna Turnblad: Penny, get home before your mother shoots you.
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Link Larkin: [presents Amber with a ring] It's time.
Amber von Tussel: Oh!
[Amber and Link kiss]
Velma Von Tussle: Amber! Save your personal life for the camera, sweetie! Oop, shiny!
[sends Amber off to makeup for more powder]
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Motormouth Maybelle: [to Seaweed and Penny] Oh, so this is love?
[pauses, then smiles]
Motormouth Maybelle: Well, love is a gift, a lot of people don't remember that. So, you two better brace yourselves for a whole lotta ugly comin' at you from a neverending parade of stupid.
Penny Pingleton: [deadpans] So, you've met my mom?
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[from trailer]
Link Larkin: [to Tracy] I think knowing you is the start of a pretty big adventure.
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[from trailer]
Velma Von Tussle: [to Edna, about Tracy] Tracy certainly has redefined our standards
[chuckles]
Amber von Tussel: That's for sure.
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Prudy Pingleton: [about Tracy, who was just on the news] You see? You see! If I let you leave the house right now, you'd be in prison, fighting whores for cigarettes. That Tracy Turnblad always was a bad influence! Well, you are never, ever gonna see that beehived harlot again.
Penny Pingleton: [sees Tracy in the window, gets up to leave] Okay, mother. Excuse me.
Prudy Pingleton: Penny!
[offers her a rosary]
Prudy Pingleton: Pray for her. She's gonna need it.
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Velma Von Tussle: They're just kids, that's why we have to steer them in the white direction.
Corny Collins: [pause] RIGHT direction?
Velma Von Tussle: Isn't that what I said?
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