Watching the brilliant new film of the so-so new musical of the campy old movie cult classic Hairspray, you can’t help wondering about the iconic succession in the mother role of Divine, Harvey Fierstein, John Travolta and Michael Ball.

The first two underground drag artists breached the mainstream, while Travolta represents an arc from teen fave in Grease to grandma’s delight in Hairspray, which is where Michael “Grease” Ball is presumably positioning himself right now.

Hairspray is bafflingly (to me) still packing out on Broadway, where the film has only increased interest in the stage show; but I bet the opposite happens here.

The kids are so terrific in the film, and Christopher Walken so funny and touching as Dad, it’s hard to see where the West End show can make any improvements or indeed satisfactory substitutions.

The one thing really going for Hairspray is the accidental topicality of vote rigging on television phone-in talent shows. But will that, and the transatlantic obsession with the pre-Beatles and Stones 1960s before they became “Swinging” be enough? The film movingly implies the start of the civil rights movement and the first short flush of the Kennedy presidency.

How much will we take of that from the Shaftesbury version? Can’t wait to find out. The other great conundrum of movie-to-stage this autumn will be All About My Mother at the Old Vic, a landmark Almodovar film that makes witty cinematic use of the theatre as a genre.

With Edinburgh looming, I can’t help but remember a gaggle of theatre critics assembling outside the King’s one year for the Kenneth Branagh company matinee premiere of King Lear (starring Richard Briers).

Swimming against the tide, as he always did, was the acerbic American director/critic Charles Marowitz, crossing the road to see an Almodovar movie before any of us had even heard of the Spanish director.

The movie in question was Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, a title guaranteed to appeal to the free-living/loving Marowitz. He was probably right to dismiss us as a bunch of sad losers. The King Lear had a lot of rigging — “String” Lear it became known as — but not one of the actors was ever interestingly restrained in its knots and meshes.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.