Last night my wife and I watched Hairspray Live!, the latest of NBC’s forays into live broadcasting of musicals. The one sentence review: it was the best and most ambitious of these productions to date. All in all a pleasant evening that would have been better in a two and a half hour slot than it was in the three hour slot it occupied. The incessant commercial and feature breaks hurt the continuity.
The best things about the show were Kristin Chenoweth, Derek Hough, and Martin Short’s suit of lights in the closing parts of the show. The show suffered from technical problems—both lighting and sound. Those weren’t artifacts of live production. They were artifacts of hurried production.
The ambition showed in the huge sets, the abandoning of the proscenium approach used in prior Live! productions, and the heavy use of body mount rigs for follow shots.
That may offer us a vision of things to come. Will they do more of this for the upcoming Bye Bye Birdie? I don’t see how unless they abandon some of the iconic aspects of the stage show.
The Critics
New York Daily News (didn’t like it)
New York Times (liked it, sort of)
Washington Post (liked it, sort of)
USA Today (liked it)
The review I liked the best as usual was in Variety:
It took about an hour for “Hairspray Live!†to find its sweet spot. The energy was a little low, a line got dropped, and the production — the most complex, it appeared, that NBC has attempted in this current spate of live musicals — took a few musical numbers to settle into a rhythm. But once it did (the energy seemed to kick in with “Welcome to the ‘60sâ€) the musical easily became the best NBC has attempted.
It’s hard to imagine better casting for the production. Jennifer Hudson stole the show, once Motormouth Maybelle got to the screen; Ariana Grande, certifiable pop star, came away as the show’s MVP, acting as both reliably overlook-able sidekick and, once the situation required it, showstopping diva. Harvey Fierstein was predictably great, reprising his role from Broadway as Edna. Martin Short, frequently misused, found the right profile for himself as Wilbur.
