[Ale]

Значится, сабж.

А я еще ругала "Продюсеров" прошлой весной... Ха! Да "Продюсеры" по сравнению с этим "Лаком для волос" (ну, насколько можно судить по статьям, не смотревши мюзикл лично) глубоки как "Война и мир". )))

Вуаля. Информация к размышлению и несколько фоток.

The Big Tease
(статья из "Entertainment weekly", August, 23-30 2002)

Advance buzz was that “Hairspray”’s a brush with greatness. Barely a cut above is more like it.
By Scott Brown

Attention, all who take their flamingos pink and their living desperate: You will not see the Popular Blonde puke on an amusement-park ride in Broadway’s latest hot-ticket fait accompli, “Hairspray”, a production as tidy competent as John Water’s 1988 midnight movie was defiantely flabby-shabby. The mood survives only in the stops-out opener, where Tracy Turnblad (Marissa Jaret Winokur – winning, nimble, and likely to revive the term “portly pepperpot”) rises majestically from bed and resolves to show Kennedy-era Baltimore she can mash potatoes with the skinnies on TV. Rats scramble over her feet. A flasher darts by. But by mid-act, all that glorious polyester is coated in polyurethane – a sleek, prefab blockbuster upon us.

To be fair, it wasn’t Water’s genial sense of seedy subversion that “Hairspray”’s producers were after – just the box-office guarantee of camp and nostalgia, coupled with primal urge to drape Harvey Fierstein in enough drag to wrap the Pont-Neuf. And, thanks to a remarkably strong cast and the Lights! Candy! Action! Brio of Jack O’Bien’s direction, that’s sufficient to rattle rafters in distant Maryland – a notable feat, considering Marc Shaiman and Scott Whittman’s ruthlessly smooth ‘60s-pastiche tunes fade after every button, and choreographer Jerry Mitchell’s hoofery evokes a good high school production of “Grease”. But Fierstein, as Tracy’s mountainous mother, Edna, rises above all – literally – with a singing voice that sounds like Popeye swallowing a weed-eater – hands down, the most oddly charming noise ever made by human being. He and Winokur have combined stage presence and body mass of the entire Cirque du Soleil.

So why saddle these jaggernauts with tiresome, Lifetime-standard body-image issues? At its plump bottom, “Hairspray” is supposed to be about what happens when the fat girl is on top – arbitrary and without apology. Waters took that for granted 14 years ago; today, it apparently needs explaining. Racial strife, too, was simply part of his 2-D Baltimore back-drop; today, we get an 11th-hour “we shall overcome” spiritual, which, in a show that exults in the line “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice”, is like inviting a rabbi to say Kaddish after “Springtime for Hitler”. There’s only one treatment for such generic primness: a remount in glorious Odorama. But even that’s no cure – scratch this show and what you sniff is New Car Smell.