Michael Ball as Edna
Tweet

Review Round-up: Hairspray Is a Hit for Shaftesbury

The award-winning hit musical, Hairspray, opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre last night (30 October, previews from 11 October) starring Michael Ball (pictured) and Leanne Jones as Edna Turnblad and her daughter Tracy Turnblad respectively (See WOS TV, 30 Oct 2007). The production is currently booking to 15 March 2008.

Hairspray premiered in August 2002 at Broadway’s Neil Simon Theater, where it’s still running, going on to win eight 2003 Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Based on John Waters' cult retro 1988 film and set in 1960s Baltimore, it tells the story of geeky overweight teen Tracy, who finds celebrity on a TV dance programme. Can she get the guy and still have time to change the world?

The musical has a book by Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan, with music by Marc Shaiman and lyrics by Scott Whitman and Shaiman. It’s directed by Jack O'Brien and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell. The film of the musical was released in the UK this summer. In addition to Ball and Jones, the cast includes Mel Smith, Tracie Bennett, Rachel Wooding, Paul Manuel, Adrian Hansel, Johnnie Fiori and Any Dream Will Do’s Ben Ellis.

It’s official! A critical hit for the Shaftesbury! Hairspray well and truly won over the first night critics yesterday as they welcomed the show that is “ecstatic” and “riotous”. Special praise was thrown on Michael Ball who was “deliciously fattened up and dragged down”, but newcomer Leanne Jones also caught the critic’s attention “with a talent as high and wide as her scooped-up hair”. Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman didn’t escape the cascade of praise as their music and lyrics were commended for pulsating “with musical excitement as well as political anger”. The hit that has eluded the Shaftsbury for so long looks to have arrived as the audience glimpse what the critics consider is a truly entertaining production.

Benedict Nightingale in the Times (four stars) “The musical is as delightful as I recall it being on Broadway three years ago and more immediate than it could ever be in the cinema. True, the tale of chubby, chunky Tracy Turnblad, who wears what looks like a lacquered wolverine on her head and thinks she resembles Jackie Kennedy, is unashamedly and, at times, absurdly sentimental. But when Leanne Jones’ Tracy is bounding about the stage exuding all-American resilience and optimism — well, she brought out the inner cheerleader I didn’t know I had … Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan’s book is a salute to difference. That’s defined both as being fat, like Jones’s Tracy or Michael Ball as her gloriously bloated mother, and, more seriously, as being black in racially divided Maryland. So our heroine’s aim isn’t only to do well on the dance floor, beating her plastic-doll schoolmate Amber, but to integrate Corny Collins’s show, besting Amber’s ruthlessly ambitious, racially bigoted mother, Velma.”

- by Tom Atkins & Katie Jackson

Related Content