[NEohioPAL] Review of "Hairspray" at Porthouse Theatre

[Bob Abelman via NEohioPAL]

Porthouse’s ‘Hairspray’ offers a slightly dented ‘do



Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics





If artistic antithesis is what Porthouse Theatre was going for this season, it has certainly hit its mark.



Few musicals are more dissimilar than the summer stock company’s July offering of “Violet” – with its sensitive and highly theatrical storytelling, patchwork of rural southern folk music, and short story-to staged concert-to Broadway origins – and “Hairspray,” its current production.



Based on a blatantly low-budgeted nonmusical film by king-of-camp John Waters, the stage version of “Hairspray” shares the light-weight storyline of a big girl with big dreams against a backdrop of the civil rights movement in 1960s Baltimore.  



Tracy Turnblad lives to dance and, despite her unfashionable girth, unpopular parents and liberal views, lands a spot on a local TV teen dance program, which she helps integrate with her high school detention buddies. 



In these dog-days of August, “Hairspray” is a refreshing spritz of aerosol that repels humidity and lethargy thanks to an airy, uplifting musical comedy book by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, upbeat period pop-rock music by Marc Shaiman, and wonderfully playful lyrics by Shaiman and Scott Wittman.   Audiences are expected to leave their brains at the door and enjoy the cool breeze that is this show.



One of the musical’s more campy conventions, which is a remnant from its celluloid days, is having a man in drag play Tracy’s Mom.  As past productions have learned, “Hairspray” is at its best when Edna is portrayed as broad and boisterous, and the rest of the production follows suit.



Everything about this Porthouse production is delightfully broad and boisterous, except its Edna.





For the rest of this review, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/
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