"hairspray"

John Waters 1988 cult movie Hairspray was that comic renegade director’s biggest mainstream success. It still must have been a challenge for the creative team of Marc Shaiman, Scott Whitman, Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan to adapt the film as a Broadway stage musical in 2002. They managed to bring to the project a classic Broadway professionalism while retaining the source material’s gay camp sensibility. That ain’t easy. They were enormously aided by casting Harvey Fierstein in the key role of Edna Turnblad, created on film by Waters’s late muse, Divine. Harvey, a multiple Tony Award winner, had previously changed the way gay people were portrayed on Broadway as the author and star of the ground-breaking Torch Song Trilogy, as well as his contribution as book writer for the musical La Cage Aux Folles. His portrayal of Edna won him yet another Tony and gave us a musical theater heroine who could take her place alongside of Merman’s Rose, Carol Channing’s Dolly and Angela Lansbury’s Mame.

Charles Busch

A hand signed limited edition lithograph of this work is available for sale.