MUSICAL PERFORMANCE

Musical Performance (Hairspray)



Musical Performance (Hairspray)

Introduction

Hairspray is a musical film directed by Adam Shankman and released in 2007. This is the film adaptation of the musical namesake of Marc Shaiman, Thomas Meehan and Mark O'Donnell, created on Broadway in 2002; itself inspired the movie Hairspray for John Waters (1988). Hairspray's movie version was released on 15 August 2002. As on 31st December 2006, 1,824 performances have been made. The film's music is composed by Marc Shaimnan. The book for of Hairspray was developed by Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan (Godlovitch, 2002).

Hairspray is the story of Tracy Turnblad (Marissa Jaret Winokur), a short, plump, white teenager with a huge hairdo in 1962 who dreams of appearing on the local TV dance program, the Corny Collins Show. She achieves her goal and sets out to integrate the show, beginning on Mother- Daughter Day. Tracy's mother (cross-dressed Harvey Fierstein) is reluctant to appear on the broadcast because of her larger-than-average size, but joins her daughter in the spectacular high-energy finale. “You cannot Stop the beat.” during which the Corns' Collins Show becomes officially and irreversibly integrated on live television (Shaiman et al, 2003). The musical dealt with aspects of diversity in terms of both race and body type (Hairspraythemusical.com). The lively score evoked the styles of early 1960s rock 'n' roll. The movie version of Hairspray won eight Tony Awards, including the Best Musical, Best Book, Best Actor (Fierstein), Best Actress (Winokur), and Best Featured Actor (Dick Latessa as Wilbur Turmblad).

Discussion and Analysis

For better or worse, Hairspray is far more essentialist in its view of gender than its puns and cross-dressing might suggest. The musical shows nothing arbitrary or unnatural about the female characters' love of self-fashioning; their behavior is presented not as an artificial performance but, on the contrary, as a natural expression of gender identity. What Hairspray attacks is unequal access to expressions of one's nature: black dancers not permitted to dance because of racism; pubescent girls not allowed to have fun because of puritanical parents (as in the case of Tracey's girlfriend); women not allowed to behave like women because of prejudice against the fat or the “ugly (Downing, 2001).

Admittedly, Divine and Travolta do literally perform Edna's feminity, but this fact is open to many interpretations. It suggests a parallel between victims of beauty perfectionism (women) and victims of “gender perfectionism' (gays, cross-dressers). Coercive social mores and the rigid binaries encoded in literary romance (as we saw in 'The Birthmark') value only formally gorgeous women and straight men, and that leave a lot of people 'less equal'.

The symbolic solution to this Injustice, as Hairspray presents it, is Tracy's dancing. It is a natural talent, Sanders gift, for within the racial assumptions of the community, Tracy's dancing is a mysterious accident: she has rhythm' even though she is white. That Tracy's dancing stirs the admiration of the cutest boy on the TV show is also unexpected, given that he could have had his pick of conventionally pretty ...