Review: Music Carries the Day in The Umbrella Stage Company's HAIRSPRAY

In most, if not all, other mountings of “Hairspray: The Broadway Musical,” Tracy Turnblad is tucked under her bedcovers when audiences first see the young heroine, ready to show off her high-teased bouffant and let loose with the first notes of the rousing opener, “Good Morning, Baltimore.”

In the current Umbrella Stage Company production, at the Umbrella Arts Center in Concord, however, there is no bed and Tracy (Nora Sullivan) instead sings as she walks down a staircase at the back of scenic designer Cameron McEachern’s brightly colored but sparse set, with period elements by properties and set dressing designer Hannah Spangler. From the get-go, this seems more like a well choreographed concert staging than the bouncy, bright, full-out production audiences have come to expect.

Director and choreographer Najee A. Brown and musical director Jordan Oczkowski put the large and skilled company through its paces on the high-energy dance numbers, which look and sound terrific and show off the best of what this sometimes sluggishly paced production has to offer. During the non-musical moments, the story sometimes lags and the dialogue can be muffled despite the otherwise strong voices of this cast.

Based on the John Waters 1988 cult film of the same name, “Hairspray” tells the tale of Tracy Turnblad, a hefty high schooler who lands a spot on “The Corny Collins Show” – Baltimore’s answer to “American Bandstand” – and while dancing the Watusi, decides it’s time to integrate the all-white show. With its quirkily delivered anti-segregation message, the movie was adapted into a mainstream musical by composer and lyricist Marc Shaiman and lyricist Scott Wittman, and book writers Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, winning eight 2003 Tony Awards including Best Musical, and running on Broadway for seven years.

From the first national tour at the Colonial to subsequent tours that played the Wang Theatre and Citizens Opera House, and an all but limitless list of local productions, “Hairspray” has proven enduringly popular. That popularity also extends to local actors. Indeed, two of the leads in Concord – Robert Saoud as Edna Turnblad and Aimee Doherty as Velma Von Tussle – are reprising roles they played at Wheelock Family Theatre in that Boston company’s Elliot Norton Award-winning 2014 production. Ensemble member Simone Alyse’s own “Hairspray” history began when, as a 10-year-old, she played Little Inez at North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly.

With a powerhouse singing voice to match her megawatt smile, Sullivan deftly demonstrates that a portly pepper pot need not live in the shadow of any ingénue. Whether Tracy’s declaring her independence on “Mama, I’m a Big Girl Now” or her love for Link Larkin with “I Can Hear the Bells,” Sullivan does every clever and witty lyric justice with her soaring vocals. She’s well matched by Nick Corsi, who brings a wholesome swagger to Link and teen-idol vocal chops to his swoon-inducing “It Takes Two.”

Youthful enthusiasm aside, it is 1962 and segregation is still the order of the day. Show host Corny Collins – given TV-star appeal by Joshua Lapierre – wants his show to move with the times, but his producer, Velma, believes having “Negro Day” on the program once a month is more than enough.

The villainous Velma – played perfectly by Doherty, who’s garbed like a 1960s fashion Barbie doll and builds momentum with increasingly maniacal reprises of “Miss Baltimore Crabs” – doesn’t just want to prevent black and white people from dancing together, she also wants to keep both the show’s star spot and its leading man, Link, for her daughter, Amber (Lisa Kate Joyce), by keeping the more talented Tracy out of sight. Joyce is a fun-to-watch, zanier Amber than most, but her all-too-obvious wig by Cara Guappone of Emerald City, which would have suited Elly May Clampett on TV’s “The Beverly Hillbillies,” is an unnecessary distraction.

As Tracy’s devoted, if decidedly off-kilter, parents – larger-than-life laundress Edna and joke-shop proprietor Wilbur – Robert Saoud and Chip Phillips are a sheer delight on their act-two duet, “You’re Timeless to Me.” However, anyone who has seen earlier Ednas – perhaps Harvey Fierstein or George Wendt on Broadway, Bruce Vilanch in Boston, or Divine in the original film – may be expecting a more free-form style for the humorous and heart-tugging character. After all, Edna once dreamed of a career designing clothes for her fellow full-figured women. “I was going to be the biggest thing in brassieres,” she deadpans, with only the slightest hint of irony. Saoud does a fine job with the music, but his subdued acting keeps his Edna from her rightful place, alongside Tracy at the heart of the show.

Tracy’s hapless, but far from hopeless, sidekick, Penny Pingleton (Maggie Cavanaugh) offers up one surprise after another and shows off a sensational voice on “Without Love.” Cavanaugh is paired with the smooth-moving Christian David as Seaweed J. Stubbs – a teen who knocks down some racial barriers of his own when he comes courting from the part of town where “it’s Negro Day every day.” Supporting him on his journey is his mother, the aptly named record-shop owner Motormouth Maybelle, portrayed by the gifted Barbara Pierre, who exudes sass on the act-one closer, “Big, Blonde, and Beautiful,” and later blows the roof off the place, bringing soulful power to the stirring “I Know Where I’ve Been.”

Waters’ trademark quirky characters are a bit more restrained here than in his films, but their spirit survives most notably in the work of Meryl Galaid, as the prison matron and as Penny’s mom, Prudy Pingleton. The rubber-faced Galaid wrings the laughs out of the sadism of both her characters, proving that Waters’s patented irreverence still runs through “Hairspray.” Welcome to the ’60s, indeed!