A Good Hair Day
How fitting that the season’s biggest, boldest, most colorful musical should have a companion book of equal quality. Wasting no time in getting in on Hairspray-mania, Faber & Faber are releasing this month an over-sized 168-page hardcover book called Hairspray: The Roots, “Hosted by the Authors of the Hit Broadway Musical, Mark O’Donnell, Thomas Meehan, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman.”
Over the years, a small number of Broadway musicals, from modest successes like Titanic to mega-hits like The Producers, have been memorialized via attractive, color-photo-laden books. Though these books almost always include the musical’s libretto, the lesser of them read like beefed-up versions of the show’s souvenir program, whereas the better ones offer true glimpses behind the scenes in addition to numerous production photos. And Hairspray: The Roots is the best of the lot.
Fans of the show will happily devour this book, which is gaudily gorgeous and packed solid with goodies. Opening with a preface by the four authors, it proceeds to an in-depth, informative, and very entertaining interview with John Waters, the creator of the movie upon which the musical is based, and one of the show’s producers, Margo Lion. As a sidebar to the lengthy interview, co-bookwriter O’Donnell offers “The Hairspray Continuum: From Backstory To Flash Forward,” a hilarious timeline that follows the exploits of Hairspray‘s characters from 1945 on into 2000. (Here’s an example. 1961: “Link Larkin is declared most happening guy at Patterson Park High School; administration refuses to acknowledge Link happening.”)
The bulk of the book is taken up by the show’s libretto. Needless to say, production and rehearsal photos abound in these pages, but the wonderful innovation here is the inclusion of little color-coded boxes next to the text, in which the various authors insert bits of information — sort of like a commentary track on a DVD. These remarks cover a wide range, illuminating the process of adapting a movie for the stage (e.g., “Velma combines three characters from the movie: Debbie Harry’s pushy stage mom; Mink Stole, harried stage manager; and Divine’s cameo as the bigoted station owner. Efficient, huh?”). They also explain ’60s culture and music (“Early ’60s pop songs are full of dead teenagers”), comment on the text (in reference to Corny Collins’s mention of Druid Hill: “A real street, though Baltimorons pronounce it ‘Drood'”), and provide theories on comedy (“Alliteration leads to laffs!”). Best of all, numerous song lyrics and lines cut from the show are included (e.g., Link: “I don’t know about you guys, but rejecting all these girls wears me out.”)
Interspersed throughout the libretto are articles by Hairspray‘s other contributors: Jack O’Brien provides an essay about the musical’s pre-Broadway life, all of the show’s designers discuss their creations, and stars Harvey Fierstein and Marissa Jaret Winokur offer first person accounts through e-mails and diary entries. Among the most entertaining bits are Shaiman and Wittman’s list of words that rhyme with Baltimore, photo inserts of ’60s pop culture and iconography, and goofy Hairspray-inspired games and trivia like the “Get Tracy to the Corny Collins Audition” maze and the “Can You Match the Character to His or Her Secret Vice?!” match-up game. With all of the STUFF included in the book, it’s easy to almost overlook its one great misstep: the failure to include the show’s entire script. All of the song lyrics are printed but, while chunks of the dialogue are included, much of it is missing. (Descriptions of those sections are included, but it’s not the same.)
That significant flaw aside, Hairspray: The Roots is a must-have for fans of the musical — and those who aren’t yet fans will likely be converts by the time they reach the end of the book. It’s not only a fine distillation of the experience of the show but also a detailed, endlessly joyful, and amusing look at the creative process behind it.
