Today we continue the 2014 edition of our annual BroadwayWorld feature series spotlighting the very best Tony Awards-related moments of all time with a special focus on a major hit 21st century musical with a pertinent and positive message of self-acceptance, HAIRSPRAY.
Without Love A musical based on a John Waters movie may seem highly dubious when considering the largely Las Vegas-esque, mostly family-friendly theme park-type attraction Broadway prominently features these days, yet HAISPRAY proved the quite vocal naysayers wrong when it debuted in 2002. After all, very few musicals contain this many larger-than-life personalities - from chunky but plucky Tracy Turnblad to her hefty hermetic mother, Edna, her daffy dad, Wilbur, to Tracy's spunky best friend, Penny, her prospective paramour, Link, and her pair of mother-daughter nemesises, Amber and Velma Von Tussle; not to mention record store owner Motormouth Maybelle and her triple-threat son, Seaweed - and HAIRSPRAY served them all up in the most appetizing and appealing of fashions. Giving panoramic Technicolor, vivid surround sound character color, shading and sound to the various characters, composing team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman crafted one of the most instantly enjoyably and endlessly earworm-packed scores in recent memory with their contributions to HAIRSPRAY and each one of the denizens of the 1960s Baltimore it evokes gets a showstopper to match their outlandish persona, complete with overflowing amounts of attitude, heart and humor.
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