Review: Feet Planted Firmly In The Air: HAIRSPRAY at Toby's

Hairspray has its feet planted firmly in the air. It shows things we know never happened and never will happen: the local teen culture's superstar stud falling for the ungainly fat girl, the fat girl displacing the fashionable girls as doyenne of that culture, the girl's father blithely still smitten after years of marriage with a woman routinely played by a large man in a housecoat, a 1960s local teen dance show fully racially integrated. The show is, in fact, a great raspberry blown in the face of realistic expectations, a visit to a fantasyland where cruelty and meanness and class pretensions stand no chance. And we never get tired of watching that raspberry get blown.

Toby's, the local dinner theater par excellence, certainly does not get tired of blowing it. The last time around with the show for the Toby's organization was only four years ago, when they produced it on their late lamented Baltimore stage. I was on hand for that production, and most of what I wrote then applies to this revival of the revival. So here it is again, adapted, mutatis mutandis, to the 2016 production:

It's a safe bet that anyone going to see a revival of Hairspray nowadays will have a pretty good idea what to expect. We have seen John Waters' original 1998 movie, the oft-revived 2002 Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman musical based on the movie, and the 2007 film of the musical. With all these Hairsprays, the characters (Tracy Turnblad and her mother Edna, Velma von Tussle and her daughter Amber, Tracy's best friend Penny, and Tracy's boyfriend Link, among others) are all permanent parts of our culture. Nor is it likely that a new production of Hairspray will give us something new. Instead what we as theatergoers ask of any Hairspray production is for it to be familiar and fun.

It's a strange place for a work so transgressive a mere 18 years ago to have ended up. But somehow we've got to the point where John Waters' original sendups of racial, social, and sexual taboos have become theatrical comfort food, safe for dinner theaters. It got to that point by delivering so much enjoyment every moment that no one could possibly resist. There is a funny lyric, cunning bit of stage business, amusing dance, or just wonderful music, going on from the opening to the curtain. You watch it with a constant grin from one end to the other. And every time you see the show, it's like that, if done properly. Comfort food.

So be it. The criterion for the success of a Hairspray revival is whether it is as enjoyable as all the other Hairspray revivals. Not a demanding criterion, necessarily, though the bar does go up a little over time, and not just because we've seen it before. Like everything else, it becomes more of a period piece (I mean turn-of-the-century, not 1960s) as fewer and fewer members of the audience are going to get jokes like "a half-filled book of Green Stamps, beyond redemption" or referencing how many people have "handled" the Gabors (the Kardashians of old).

The current incarnation of the show at Toby's of Columbia mostly meets the criterion.

There can be no criticism of the cast. Christie Graham (Tracy), is just outstanding, perhaps the best-danced Tracy I've ever seen, her custoMary Joy utterly infectious. Heather Marie Beck breathes the required fire as the hateful Velma, the doomed protector of the old order. Sophie Schulman is a delightful Penny, exuding an acolyte's earnestness in her belief in Tracy's mission to overturn the teenaged world order. Kelli Blackwell, pictured above, brings full church choir dynamics to the eleven o'clock anthem I Know Where I've Been, which is the main thing the Motormouth Maybelle character exists to do. She was Motormouth in 2012, as well, and it's great to see her back. The repeat portrayal of Edna by Lawrence B. Munsey is also outstanding; more than any other Edna I've seen, Munsey brings out the femininity and vulnerability of the character without sacrificing her drag queen strut at appropriate moments. And mention of these performances is no aspersion on the others.

One can also praise the costumes by Mr. Munsey, especially Edna's finery after she sheds housecoat (another period joke that will resonate less over the years). He is a man (except when he's being a woman) of many talents.

The Achilles heel here, as ever at Toby's, is the sound design, which simply lets down the songs. I felt it most acutely in the closer, You Can't Stop the Beat. The lyrics were often inaudible, and there was something off about the balance between the singers and the band. This is the number that Jack Viertel in this year's indispensable anatomy of the genre, The Secret Life of the American Musical, calls "so infectious that almost no human body is able to remain still when it is played," a piece which is therefore given the ambitious mission of going on and on as the various plots are all resolved. It was good, of course, and everyone sang and danced correctly. But there was some kind of punch missing, and I blame the sound design. It demoted what should have been a bubbly champagne sort of experience to perhaps the fun of a good mug of beer. It was a good mug, though.

And besides: what true Baltimorean can ever get enough Hairspray, or, for that matter, beer? Welcome back to the 60s.

Hairspray, Music by Marc Shaiman, Lyrics by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman, Book by Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan, Directed by Mark Minnick. Through September 4 at Toby's Dinner Theatre of Columbia, 5900 Symphony Woods Road, Columbia, MD 21044. 410-730-8311. www.tobysdinnertheatre.com. Tickets $41.50-$60.00. Mild adult content.

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