The year is 1962, the last calendar year before the assassination of JFK. The place is Baltimore, a city long of both the north and south. In this time and place, the bouffant hairdos of teenage girls aren't the only things that need help standing up to the winds of change. Welcome to Hairspray. The national tour of the 2003 Tony-Award winner based on the 1988 movie by John Waters plays to sellout crowds in Fort Lauderdale at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts' 2,700-seat main theater.
The cast is uniformly engaging. The set's cotton-candy-colored row houses (by David Rockwell) and alternately silhouetting and pulsating lighting (by Kenneth Posner) function almost as characters in their own right.
Only one thing seemed discordant at a performance in the second week of the run of this energetic, big-hearted musical: The music wasn't loud enough. It was as if one of the kids' parents had come in and ordered it turned down. The problem wasn't enough to mute the proceedings -- as the finale says, "You Can't Stop the Beat" -- but there were times it didn't match the buoyancy of the performers on stage. And there's a wide spectrum of music to appreciate in the award-winning, Marc Shaiman-Scott Wittman score of this play set before the days of radio narrowcasting: showtunes, dance numbers, gospel, a bit of something one character refers to as "Detroit sound" (but that soon enough would be known as Motown), and a nice front-of-curtain duet of adult love.
Keala Settle shines as Tracy Turnblad, the stout (Tracy's word) teenager who gets her big chance to dance on the after-school TV program hosted by Corny Collins and almost immediately sets out to integrate the show. Her celebrity status is, after all, the result of a fortuitous afternoon in high school detention where she learned a hot dance step from Seaweed, whose mother is the deejay on Corky Collins' occasional "Negro Day" shows.
Tracy's parents wouldn't be the ones to complain about decibels. Edna, traditionally played in drag and here assayed nicely by John Pinette, is a thwarted dress designer who wants to protect her daughter from the disappointment she knows as a big woman. The short-and-slight Wilbur, played by Steven DeRosa, is a father of the follow-your-dream school who owns a joke shop. There are other parents as well: smothering and stage mothering. And other teens: snobbish and cruel, low-key and loyal, uncertain but well-meaning.
Of the parents, Edna gets the stage most often, including a featured spot in the Act I pick-me-up, "Welcome to the '60s," but the Edna-Wilbur "Timeless to Me" duet is a welcome part of the proceedings. As rousing as is "Welcome to the '60s," it serves only as a warm-up to "Run and Tell That," an insistent call delivered in electrifying fashion by Alan Mingo Jr. as Seaweed.
Hairspay is propelled not only by its musical numbers but by the use of minimal sets that are rolled in and out (Baltimore's row houses), props that almost effortlessly suggest place and perspective (the jail cell's hand-held bars in "The Big Dollhouse"), and the lighting that can be subtly efficient (the silhouettes of jail inmates or of suspended TV studio lamps). Hairspray has a lot going under that teased-up do. Now run and tell that.
