Editor’s Pick: Hairspray at The National Theatre
metroweekly.comJohn Waters‘s lovable 1988 indie film about a big girl with big dreams in ’60s-era Baltimore danced its way to wild success on Broadway, courtesy of the savvy, perfectly realized musical adaptation by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman.The life and creative partners won the 2003 Tony Award for Best Original Score, just one of eight total trophies racked up by the heart-warming Hairspray, including the top trophy as Best Musical and wins for the show’s director Jack O’Brien, book writers Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, and three members of the original cast, led by Harvey Fierstein, who donned drag to play the show’s leading matriarch Edna Turnblad.“There was no gay agenda behind Edna being played by a man,” Shaiman told Metro Weekly in 2005. “First of all, it’s just there because that’s the way it was in the movie.
Simple as that. And also it just becomes about accepting people no matter how odd they may seem. And something about a man playing a woman underscores that.”Even more fundamental to effectively telling this tale, an unassuming musical comedy about the harms of racism, is the need for the cast to be racially diverse. “It’s something we’re proud about — the fact that the cast is half-Black, half-white.
It’s not a Black musical. It’s not a white musical. It’s a show with a completely integrated cast. It is a real rarity.”Leading the cast in the national touring production, currently running at Washington’s National Theatre, is Andrew Levitt, better known as Nina West, Miss Congeniality from RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 11 and the drag doyenne of Columbus.Levitt plays Edna opposite Christopher Swan as Edna’s husband Wilbur and Niki Metcalf as their daughter Tracy Turnblad, while Sandie Lee is the show’s Black matriarch.
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