Hairspray is one movie musical that gets it right, says Donald Clarke
CHICAGO has a lot to answer for. In the years since that film won its Oscars, any number of stage musicals have been dragged from their beds and flung half-dressed into the world's unwelcoming cinemas. The Producers and Rent, both colossal successes on stage, flopped badly when opened out and flattened onto celluloid.
Hollywood seems to have forgotten that we no longer live in the era where every Broadway hit is followed up by a successful original cast recording. Even if those films had been halfway decent - and they weren't - the majority of the public would still not have known the tunes well enough to sing along.
Hairspray is, in that regard, no exception. None of the songs in the original show, an adaptation of a John Waters 1988 film, has troubled even the most remote wildernesses of the hit parade. Yet Adam Shankman's film is so relentlessly genial and features such irresistibly enthusiastic performances that it should win audiences over. There have been many more subtle films released this year, but none that offers so much good, uncomplicated fun.
That said, Hairspray does dare to take a significant sociological subject as its backdrop. Set in Baltimore during the early 1960s, it details the moment television executives dared to desegregate their light entertainment shows.
Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky), a spherical teenager with an overpoweringly breezy manner, is a fan of a televised dance party called The Corny Collins Show. At her first audition, Tracy is rejected by Velma Von Tussle (Michelle Pfeiffer), the bitter scarecrow who oversees the extravaganza. But after learning some hot moves from the black kids during detention, Tracy gains entry via the back door and goes on to become a popular sensation.
When Velma seeks to abolish "Negro Day", a session set aside for African-American dancers, Tracy, who cares more for her friends than fame, takes to the street in protest.
Blonsky, an unknown whose only previous performances were in high-school plays, claims Hairspray as her own within seconds of its start. Speeding about with a mile-wide grin on her face (hungry rats and a flasher played by John Waters himself greet her along the way) she bellows out the opening number, Good Morning Baltimore, with a brash enthusiasm that recalls the young Streisand in Funny Girl.
If you're not won over in the opening act then you may as well leave the cinema (and seek help).
For all Blonsky's drive, her performance has been somewhat overshadowed in the publicity by that of John Travolta. The former Tony Manero, taking on the role played by the mighty Divine in Waters's picture, dons rubber bosoms and vast dresses to give substantial flesh to Tracy's mother.
You wouldn't exactly call the performance subtle, but Travolta, adopting a prim ladylike accent, does manage to turn Edna Turnblad into something a little like a human being. His romantic number with husband Christopher Walken almost - I said "almost" - manages to escape from the shadow of high camp. That is quite an achievement.
The film's ability to appeal at an emotional level is, perhaps,
the key to its success. Adam Shankman, director of such reeking atrocities as Bringing Down the House and The Pacifier, started life as choreographer and, finally presented with material he understands, allows each of the characters to escape fabulousness and breath real oxygen.
Fans of Waters's original may bemoan the faintly cosy tone of the new work. Fantastic villains who could move happily through the films of Walt Disney here stand in for the less glamorous monsters that actually stalked the 1960s. The civil rights campaign is represented by a happy gang of pals (the great Queen Latifah among them) warbling a melodic quasi-spiritual while strolling largely unmolested through Baltimore.
But, if the smile on the flasher's face is anything to go by, Mr Waters heartily approves of this version. Who are we to disagree?
