Original Soundtrack - Hairspray [2007 Soundtrack] (CD)

All Music Guide

Hairspray began life in 1988 as the first John Waters film to earn a PG rating, despite such subversive elements as the casting of crossdressing Waters favorite Divine as Edna, the mother of the main character, tubby teenager Tracy Turnblad. The story was further softened in its conversion to a Broadway musical hit in 2002 with a raft of songs written and performed in the period style of 1962 pop/rock; this time, openly gay actor/playwright Harvey Fierstein donned a dress to play the mother, his gravelly bass voice notwithstanding. It is some measure of the work's ongoing move toward the mainstream that in the 2007 movie musical based on the stage musical that was based on the first movie, John Travolta in a fat suit becomes Edna. It may be inevitable that a bigbudget movie requires name stars and that those name stars require changes to beef up the parts they play and make them more sympathetic. The satiric edges of Hairspray have definitely been rounded off by now, but Travolta, alth...ough he doesn't make much of an impression in the film beyond his makeup and prosthetics (and, with his speaksinging, even less of one on the soundtrack), isn't really to blame for what director Adam Shankman calls the repurposing of the script and score, even though Travolta and another Hollywood name, Michelle Pfeiffer, have been handed a reprise of the song "Big, Blonde and Beautiful" that their characters did not do onstage. The real beneficiary of that repurposing seems to have been Zac Efron, who gets a whole new song, "Ladies' Choice," in his role as Link, Tracy's romantic ideal. There is a marketplace justification for this, as attendance of early showings of the film could confirm; a whole part of the audience, entirely consisting of females under five feet tall, thought of the film as the new Zac Efron movie based on his instant stardom with the tween set as the result of High School Musical. Read more Less