Umbrella’s ‘Hairspray’ is a Monumental Hair-Don’t
The famously buoyant musical lands with one thud after another
“Dying is easy; comedy is hard,” the old theatrical adage goes. Watching Hairspray at The Umbrella Arts Center, it feels less like a witticism than a warning.
How is it possible for one of musical comedy’s most reliable crowd-pleasers to end up generating almost no laughs at all? Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman’s deliriously tuneful score and Thomas Meehan and Mark O’Donnell’s expertly engineered book have carried Hairspray triumphantly through more than two decades. Yet here, Najee A. Brown’s staging is both theatrically clumsy and surprisingly amateurish, filled with awkward blocking, muddled stage pictures, frantic choreography, and performances that too often seem outmatched by the demands of the show.
Jokes are missed repeatedly, lines tossed away with little apparent thought or care. Scenes that should land effortlessly collapse into chaos instead, with actors pushing in entirely different directions from one another. Some mug shamelessly outward; others barely seem to establish characters at all. Few appear to belong in the same theatrical universe, let alone the same production. The cumulative effect is disastrous, but it’s also bewildering: a musical comedy staged with remarkably little feel for how this kind of show actually works.
Yet Hairspray can still feel miraculous in the right hands. I caught an early Broadway preview in 2002 and remember the Neil Simon Theatre practically levitating that night. The show moved with such comic momentum and infectious joy that we left in a kind of dazed euphoria, as though we had briefly inhaled better oxygen. Here, the musical feels leaden and long.
That failure stems partly from Brown’s apparent misunderstanding of camp. One does not act campy. Rather, you commit fully to a world already pitched slightly beyond reality, and the humor comes from characters who take themselves and their circumstances completely seriously. Too many performances here seem to be winking at the material instead of believing in it. Hairspray only works when everyone onstage occupies the same heightened reality — one where teenage dance shows carry life-or-death stakes and Tracy Turnblad’s optimism feels powerful enough to reorganize Baltimore itself. Brown never establishes that world.
The cast is largely on its own here, which is unfortunate because there is real talent scattered throughout the production. Robert Saoud could likely make a fine Edna under stronger direction, and Maggie Cavanaugh nicely captures Penny Pingleton’s skittish sincerity. Chip Phillips brings a lovable warmth to Wilbur, while Joshua Lapierre has the polish and confidence for Corny Collins, even if the distinction between Corny’s television persona and his off-camera self never fully registers. There are flashes of strong work elsewhere too, particularly from ensemble members Simone Alyse, Nikita DaRosa, Darren Paul, and MacKenzie LeTorré, who is the production’s best dancer.
Others seem less comfortably matched with their roles. Nick Corsi lacks the heartthrob swagger Link Larkin requires, while Christian David sings and dances capably enough as Seaweed but appears noticeably less comfortable once the music stops. Meryl Galaid, meanwhile, squanders a handful of scene-stealing comic roles.
Aimee Doherty and Lisa Kate Joyce, meanwhile, have more than enough command to make Velma and Amber Von Tussle land properly. Instead, Brown encourages them toward relentless mugging and overemphasis. At one point, the pair comes shrieking down a staircase at such sustained and unnatural volume that I’m fairly certain my left eardrum sustained permanent damage. Barbara Pierre’s Motormouth Maybelle fares somewhat better, though sections of her songs are delivered so faintly that you can barely hear her.
Tracy Turnblad herself remains the evening’s largest missing ingredient. Tracy is not merely the heroine of Hairspray; she is the force that drives it. She should move through Baltimore as though ordinary life were already bursting into song around her. Nora Sullivan never quite locates that buoyant center, though Brown’s direction hardly helps matters. Tracy should radiate the kind of irrepressible momentum that pulls the entire world of the musical into orbit around her. Here, the role feels oddly muted, and the show never fully recovers from the absence of that animating spark.
Brown’s choreography compounds the evening’s larger problems by piling movement onto the show without much regard for whether it suits the material or the performers tasked with executing it. Nearly every number is overloaded with choreography, much of it sloppy, awkward, or arbitrary. At times, the dancing is so messy that if you told me parts of it were being freestyled in real time, I’d believe you.
“You Can’t Stop the Beat” proves especially disastrous. Brown averages roughly one choreographic gesture per syllable while the orchestra barrels through the number as if there’s a curfew. The cast can barely keep pace. By the finale, everyone looks winded and slightly panicked.
Elsewhere, numbers suffer from similarly misguided instincts. “It Takes Two,” one of the score’s sweetest and simplest expressions of teenage infatuation, is so overchoreographed that the song never has room to breathe. “Timeless to Me,” which should stop the show through sheer comic ease and affection, keeps drowning beneath unnecessary choreography, including a random two-person kickline that perfectly captures Brown’s inability to distinguish exuberance from overkill. Even “Mama, I’m a Big Girl Now” becomes so cluttered with extraneous dancing that the number’s charm — the song’s mother-daughter interplay — gets almost entirely swallowed up. “Stop! Don’t! No! Please!” indeed.
The visual design presents its own problems. Hairspray may be heightened and cartoonish, but it still needs a recognizable world underneath the exaggeration. Here, however, nearly the entire musical unfolds against a shimmering silver curtain (why?) and a bulky white unit set by Cameron McEachern, featuring a staircase, television monitors, and vinyl-record floors that give the stage the unfortunate air of a cruise ship revue. Because the floor always remains the set of “The Corny Collins Show” regardless of location, scenes bleed together. Tracy’s house, detention, the Hefty Hideaway, Motormouth’s record shop, a jail that looks nothing like a jail — everything occupies the same abstract environment, giving the musical the vague geography of a shopping mall food court.
The wigs (by Emerald City Theatricals and Cara Guappone) do the production no favors either, which is a particular liability in a musical literally called Hairspray. The hair looks cheap and aggressively costumey, more Party City than early-’60s Baltimore. Alex Berg’s sound design is rough throughout. Dialogue is muffled, microphones cut in late, and singers are routinely bulldozed by the orchestra. Entire lines become impossible to make out. Even large group numbers sound tentative, the cast often seeming unsure exactly when to come in vocally (the musical direction is by Jordan Oczkowski). These are the kinds of amateur mistakes that should not still be happening on a professional stage.
Musical comedy is an unforgiving form. It demands precision, commitment, and the illusion of ease. Above all, it requires everyone onstage to believe in the same bright, ridiculous world so completely that the audience has no choice but to follow. At The Umbrella Arts Center, that world never fully materializes. What remains is not Hairspray in all its delirious joy, but a clumsy approximation of it — a musical so busy manufacturing joy that the strain eventually becomes the show.
Hairspray. Through May 17 at The Umbrella Stage Company, Concord. www.theumbrellaarts.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
