The Director's Chair: Adam Shankman's Hairspray Diary #14

BroadwayWorld.com has an exclusive look into the making of the movie musical HAIRSPRAY with this special Director's Diary written by Adam Shankman. Check back daily for new entries!

DANCE 10 LOOKS 10 

They're here. Stillman 14. So all the dancers have arrived, the crew is here, my offices are set up, my house is unpacked, and its time to rock and roll. Were starting with the Corny Collins counsel, and we'll rehearse them for several weeks until we send them home.  Then the detention kids will come and then we'll start rehearsing them separately. It feels a bit "West Side Story" to keep the blacks and the whites apart but its all very Hairspray. I'm pretty sure once we get them all together there's going to be a lot of swirl - chocolate and vanilla, that is. It should be very interesting. I really do like the kids. Everyone has their very unique personalities. Its fun watching the interaction between the American and Canadian dancers. I sort of had a fear at a certain point that the American dancers were going to be better then the Canadians, but it turns out that that's just not true. The Canadians just happen to be a lot sweeter then the Americans, but certainly no less talented.

Tiffany and Brooke are becoming a challenge to figure out how to tell them apart. Its sort of turned into a game for the choreography team. We did notice that Brooke has a mole above her lip, so anytime we are talking to them, we just have to look for the mole. Unfortunately, if we're slightly too far away or one of them is turned at a certain angle we don't know who we're talking to. It's gonna be even more challenging when they get the wigs on. Maybe I should make one of them wear some sort of tag, or maybe even name stickers,"Hello my name is Brooke. Hello my name is Tiffany;" that would be convenient. Sarah Jayne seems to be brash and has a nice leadership quality; I do like that. She's very calm and relaxed; it makes me very happy. I have Becca from LA.  She's a good ole stand by; makes me happy. I hired Hayley Podschun out of the LA touring company; also Jesse Weaver, he's Canadian, she's not, and I love they way that they dance. I have a feeling that Jesse is going to be rock solid for me and I'm probably going to end up using him in "Welcome to the Sixties" because he's Canadian. Everett Simth's also fantastic - very sweet, soft spoken, more fluid, maybe the nicest of all of us. The Canadians wear their kindness on their sleeve. 

Then there's little Josh Feldman. He seemed very distant, very off-putting, like he didn't want to be here.  But as time progresses, he seems to be becoming one of our group leaders. He was probably the best of the Canadian boy dancers, and he's a real dude. I like that. He seems to be very very very good friends with Nick Baga, they're sort of becoming the terrors of the group. Shockingly, almost every one of the guys I hired is straight - it's sort of fantastic. I have a feeling it's gonna make a lot of trouble. Then of course there's little Corey. I cant even write down the name that I started calling him in rehearsals. Hes the youngest of the bunch. Most of them look like children.

Curtis Holbrook makes me so happy I want to kick him right in the face. He's like a little baby boy where you want to grab it and squeeze and squeeze the cheeks until his head pops off - he makes me very happy and makes me laugh. Philip Spaeth is an unbelievable dancer. He and Curtis are our resident photographers, when they're not dancing they're taking pictures of everything. I like that; it's gonna make sure that we record everything that goes on in this rehearsals. Spencer Luff works so hard he exhausts me - I've never seen anybody dance so hard in my entire life, it's fantastic. It's bar-setting actually. Britney is having a great time keeping up with them. She and Sarah Jayne seem to be clicking very well, which makes me very happy. I ultimately need to set her apart from the rest of the counsel kids. Her and Zac - let's see if that works. The first dancer I cast was JP. He looks like he's 15 years old, but he has the personality of that guy that you find at the end of the bar staring into an empty shot glass at the end of the night - cigarette dangling from his lips, not speaking really any eligible words, but just a variety of syllables. That's just his personality not his reality, I hope. The Canadians are making me really happy. There's Tabitha; she barely speaks and has just wide doe eyes. She has the quietest look in world, so of course I'm going to give her the most guff possible. I continually accuse her of being a hardened drug addict with a webcam doing sex shows in order to make extra cash. That joke is definitely going to last through out the entire production period.

More tomorrow with entry #15...