“Big musical, big hair, big fun”: Hairspray the musical hits the Hop

HANOVER, NH—Break out your teasing combs and turntables: Hairspray, the record-breaking, internationally and inter-generationally beloved stage musical, hits the Hop February 17-26 in an all-out Dartmouth Department of Theater production that award-winning director Carol Dunne promises will be “big musical, big hair, big fun.”

Hairspray sweeps audiences away to 1960s Baltimore, where loveable plus-size heroine Tracy Turnblad has a passion for dancing and wins a spot on the local TV dance program. Overnight she finds herself transformed from outsider to teen celebrity. Can she manage to vanquish the program’s reigning princess and find true love without mussing her hair? And as a bonus, how about ending racial segregation?

“It’s a break of sunshine in our winter in the Upper Valley with a message of accepting people based on who they are and not what they look like,” says Dunne, an acting teacher in the Theater Department who is also Producing Artistic Director of the New London Barn Playhouse. The Playhouse swept the most recent New Hampshire Theatre Awards, winning Best Musical, Best Director and 6 other awards. Hairspray was part of the Barn’s award-winning 2010 season.

Says freshman Max Samuels, who—with the aid of copious padding on his rangy form—plays Tracy’s mother, Edna, “The show is light and fun and at the same time it does speak to the idea that being different is OK, and that it doesn’t matter how much you weigh—you can still dance. It really does have a message.”

Along with Samuels, the cast includes Dartmouth senior Amber Dewey, a veteran of numerous Dartmouth productions and performance groups, including solos and lead roles with the Dartmouth College Glee Club, the operetta The Pirates of Penzance and the a cappella group Sing Dynasty. A German major who has studied classical voice at college with Glee Club Director Louis Burkot (she and Burkot recently performed at a pre-show reception co-hosted by the Hop and VPR for ticketholders to a Met Opera HD  broadcast), she loves switching into a Broadway belt and inhabiting Tracy, who never entertains even the tiniest self-doubt. “I’m just in love with her. She has this irrepressible spirit about her. Nothing stops her,” Dewey says.

With plenty of big song and dance numbers, the production draws from an unusually wide swath of Dartmouth students, attracting not only the music and theater department regulars but also members of Dartmouth’s numerous dance troupes and a cappella groups—accompanied by a robust 10-piece pit band.

At Dartmouth, Dunne previously directed hit productions of Hair and The Rocky Horror Show, and is excited that this show, unlike those, is appropriate for all ages. “I want kids in the Upper Valley to have lots of opportunities to fall in love with theater,” says Dunne. “If I always direct musicals here that kids can’t go to, I won’t be engendering that love of theater in kids in our community.”

Dunne’s production team includes visiting theater professionals whose work has been seen in New York and on major stages across the country. Choreographer Keith Coughlin’s credits include The Toxic Avenger Musical, Outer Critics Circle Best Off-Broadway Musical-2009, TheatreworksUSA’s national tour of Click Clack Moo, and, closer to home, productions by the Cape Repertory Theater in Massachusetts and the New London Barn Playhouse. Music Director Joel Mercier served in that role in Northern Stage’s recent hit production of Annie and in some 25 productions over his past four years as Artistic Associate and Resident Music Director at the New London Barn Playhouse. The team also includes visiting professional lighting designer Nancy Schertler; Theater Department faculty Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili, set designer, and Laurie Churba Kohn, costume designer; as well as students Benjamin Blier ’13, sound designer, and Veronica Haakonsen ’12, stage manager.

Hairspray is a confirmed crowd-pleaser. Based on the 1988 John Waters film of the same name, the show’s catchy songs (by Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman) pitch-perfectly mimic a range of the period’s song styles—from the Phil Spector-esque anthem Good Morning Baltimore to the TV-corniness of The Nicest Kids in Town to the girl-group shimmer of Welcome to the ‘60s.  Says Samuels, “The music’s great. And I’m excited to be doing a show in which the music’s really popular with people my age. It’s nice because when everyone knows the songs, it just increases the energy in the room.”

On Broadway, the show ran for more than 2,500 shows after it opened in 2002, winning eight Tony Awards out of 13 nominations and also spinning off in national tours, a London West End production (which was nominated for a record-setting 11 Laurence Olivier Awards and won for Best New Musical and in three other categories) and numerous foreign productions. The 2007 film of the musical broke the record for the biggest opening-weekend sales for a movie musical and became the fourth-highest-grossing musical film in US cinema history.