IN 1972, a strange young Baltimorean with a pencil-thin moustache made a cheap film he intended to be “the most offensive movie ever made.” “Pink Flamingos” starred an obese drag queen who is shown eating poodle droppings, and its explicit purpose was to take every clich about conventional American family life and subvert it. “Pink Flamingos” was shown only at midnight on the weekends in hippie venues, and its writer-director John Waters became a cinematic version of William S. Burroughs: a middle-American hipster-pervert. Now, thirty years later, John Waters is the king of Broadway, the darling of the same suburbia he once targeted. His 1988 movie “Hairspray” has just been converted into a musical comedy that is going to run for ten years on Broadway and be performed every spring in high schools for a half century afterwards. Waters says he loves the show, and the musical version of “Hairspray” is very lovable indeed. The score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman features one showstopper after another. The book by Thomas Meehan and Mark O’Donnell is crisp and funny. Jerry Mitchell’s choreography is exuberant, the sets by David Rockwell are eye-catching, and Jack O’Brien’s direction is inspired. “Hairspray” is a giddy and propulsive show about an effort to integrate a segregated teenage dance show on Baltimore television in 1962. A dreamy-eyed fat girl named Tracy Turnblad (played by the sensational Marissa Jaret Winokur) wants more than life itself to appear on the “Corny Collins Show,” which has a team of all-white teen dancers–except for a single afternoon every month dubbed “Negro Day.” Tracy gets her wish after she’s taught some dance moves by the black kids she meets in detention. Not only that, but she steals the show’s on-air heartthrob Link away from the scheming Amber von Tussle. And when Tracy decides that “every day should be Negro Day,” the world turns upside down. The show’s composer, Marc Shaiman, is best known as the arranger of the great soundtracks to such movies as “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” He knows more about the history of American popular music than practically anyone alive, and Shaiman’s comprehensive knowledge shines through in a score that harvests every conceivable three-chord rock-and-roll progression. The songs aren’t especially memorable, but as a whole the score effervesces. Subtle “Hairspray” isn’t, but Shaiman and company understand that musicals shouldn’t be subtle. At their best, musicals are charged with manic energy. And indeed, you leave “Hairspray” on a contact high, drunk on the adrenaline the cast uses to dance its way through the show’s two hours and forty minutes. This is a great evening in the theater, and one would have to dig deep to find anything remotely offensive about it. What does this say about the man who longed to be the most offensive filmmaker who ever lived? John Waters broke all kinds of taboos in the early 1970s with his underground movies. But lots of people were looking for taboos to break in those days, and soon, for a true bohemian oddball like Waters, there was nothing left to trash. So where was he to go? Where he went was “Hairspray.” The 1988 movie was the first of his pictures to get a major studio release, but it’s actually as subversive as “Pink Flamingos.” Several years before the term “politically correct” gained popular currency, Waters offered in “Hairspray” a parody of political correctness. It’s one thing to make fun of suburban housewives, but how about sending up black folk in segregated Baltimore? That’s exactly what Waters dares to do in “Hairspray,” which is really his cracked vision of those after-school television specials about One Kid Who Dared to Make a Difference. On Broadway, Tracy’s dance guru is a cool black kid named Seaweed. In the movie, Seaweed has shellacked hair and speaks like Stepin Fetchit. His mother is a Big Mama named “Motormouth Maybelle” who speaks entirely in rhyming couplets. Seaweed begins an interracial romance with the sweet but dumb Penny Pingleton. But when she is ripped from his arms by a psychiatrist toting a hypno-disc, she turns into Natalie Wood in “Splendor in the Grass,” hysterically shrieking Seaweed’s name in a hilarious and merciless parody of every conceivable piety one can imagine. Perhaps the most quietly vicious aspect of “Hairspray” is its view of its heroine, Tracy Turnblad. The ease with which this obese girl gets on television and wins the hunk is intentionally ludicrous–because, of course, girls like Tracy don’t appear on television dance shows and don’t date the hunky guy. Waters’s subversive vision in “Hairspray” mostly sailed over the heads of its viewers. Even the casting of the drag queen Divine as Tracy’s mother didn’t faze its mainstream audience, who probably didn’t know that Divine was actually a man. The movie seemed to go down as easily as the after-school specials it was making fun of. BUT WHAT WE NOW GET on Broadway is the after-school special straight, no chaser. Tracy strikes a blow for fat people everywhere, and even gets her mother (played by another drag queen, Harvey Fierstein) to come out of her own obese shell. She and the kids are rallied to the cause of integrating the “Corny Collins Show” when Motormouth Maybelle sings a civil rights anthem called “I Know Where I’ve Been.” Even Penny and Seaweed end up happily together, with Penny announcing proudly that she is now “a checkerboard chick.” You could say that the strange journey of John Waters from the depths of the American demimonde to the towering heights of American feel-good self-help is in some ways the story of American popular culture these past thirty years. But the real irony is that the Broadway “Hairspray” is a vastly more accomplished work of popular art than anything Waters ever created on his own. His younger self would have loathed it. But that’s showbiz. Contributing editor John Podhoretz last wrote for The Weekly Standard about Oscar Hammerstein.
