iTunes Exclusive Episode Hairspray

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Number 398 for those of you playing the home game.
Welcome.
Welcome by the executive producer of the Clubhouse podcast and there was a time where I put product
in my hair.
It wasn't a very long time, but it did happen.
It doesn't any more, trust me.
But I'm not low for this issue, this episode, as the kids like to call them, sitting across
from me in the co-host chair is my co-host and a man who could probably use some product
in his hair today.
It's a little rough.
He's Chad.
Welcome, sir.
Oh dear.
Not nearly enough.
That's unfortunate.
So next to him is the lady of the house and she likes to dance.
She'll get out there and cut her rug on you a little bit.
She's a general and welcome friend.
Hello, everyone.
And I have to say Chad has the longest hair of any of us in here.
That is true.
That is a very, very valid point.
Rodney out the dance is the newest member of the cast and a man.
He just likes music.
He's a simple man.
He's Alex.
Welcome, sir.
Heavy emphasis on the simple.
I believe me.
I know about it.
Whatever we do, one of these things, it is to review something.
This is no exception.
Today, we're going to talk stage production because for a very, very short run, the acclaimed
musical hairspray is in town and it's playing here in Dallas through Sunday, July 15th
at the Windspir Opera House, part of the AT&T Performing Arts Center Complex.
Cindy and everybody over there were so excited today.
Got to let us come do this for them because we love our vendors so much.
They let us see stuff so we can talk to you guys about them and help you spend your entertainment
dollar wisely.
All right, so for those of you that have never heard of this particular production, first
of all, welcome back from the cave.
It's 1962.
It's Baltimore and you have a young lady by the name of Tracy Turnblad in this production
played by Michelle Dowdy.
She is a sophomore in high school, very comfortable with who she is.
She is not the team queen.
What would you call this image?
Stereotype.
There you go.
That's what I'm looking for.
She's not the future prom point.
But she's good with it.
She's cool like that.
She's comfortable on her own skin.
She loves to watch a show every afternoon called The Corny Collins Show.
It's a teenage dance show there in Baltimore.
The Corny Collins in this production played by Shane Allen and she just wants to become
a dancer on the show.
Well, the opportunity arises and so she cuts school to go to try out which, you know, doesn't
sit well with her mother, Edna, played by David coffee, put a pin in it.
Oh, yes.
And but it's okay by her father, Wilbur, played by Bob Reed.
So she goes ahead and cuts school and auditions and she gets a little grief from the
Von Tussles, the mother daughter combination, the mother of the producer of the show,
Velma, played here by Karis server and the daughter Amber, played by Deanna Ott, kind
of Deva Esk, if you will, just a little.
And as we're warming up to a big live show, they're going to be doing where they're going
to be crowning Miss Teen Hairspray 1962 because the ozone layer hadn't really become a
concept yet.
But so they kind of shunner a little bit and so she ends up getting detention because
she cuts school and in detention, she meets some people, one of whom is named C.W.J. Stubbs
played by Anthony Chapman the second and they think she's awesome and so they kind of
help her out.
She helps them out.
There's a lot of themes of civil rights, politics, equality in this as well and it kind
of just goes from there.
Right.
It's kind of about as deep as I want to go.
Yes.
I mean, you should have a good semblance of what's going on here by this point.
And I start my review, currently located at www.theclubhousepodcast.com, that's our website.
By talking about the fact that Hairspray has been in the public consciousness now for
30 years.
Yes.
Easily.
Never watched an iteration of it before last night.
I tried.
Never watched the film, didn't see the production, didn't see the live thing with Tervolta.
None of it.
I knew what it was.
Because live thing?
Yeah, NBC did it two years ago.
Yeah, I can't tell you how many times I've seen it.
Yeah, that was NBC's live production two years ago.
Oh, okay.
Tervolta was involved in that one too?
No, no.
I know he was in the remake movie.
That's the most right.
I mean, I've seen the both films and the live and I've seen it in theater before.
I want to say the mother role in Harvey Firestein played the role in the NBC live.
Harvey Firestein played the role in the NBC live.
Okay, okay, all right.
It was 2016, two years, about a year and a half ago.
Okay.
Harvey Firestein also played it in Broadway.
Yeah, I can definitely say.
Why would he?
And again, that role traditionally played by a male because divine played it in the original
John Waters film.
Yeah, divine is the one that developed that role.
Correct.
Edna will never be anything but divine.
Correct.
I very much enjoyed this.
I do too.
I very, very, very much enjoyed this project and I'm kind of glad I hadn't seen any other
iterations because I didn't want to have to stack this up against anything.
You know, a lot of people will say, you know, this wasn't as good as blah, blah, blah or
whatever.
I didn't have any of those notions going into it.
Right.
I could just go, you know what?
I'm going to sit back and enjoy this for the ride that it is.
Now, I will say I did go to the Wikipedia page because you know how time conscious I am,
right?
And whenever we have a program, I always like to see, okay, this is like, okay, this
is the song we're doing.
We got like two more before the break because you can't read it into dark.
No.
Now, granted where I was sitting, I probably could have because I had a little light on
the side of my chair.
I'm kind of like, you could cheat on that and get away with it.
But in this case, he's looked at the Wikipedia, I'll be like, okay, here's two from the
end.
We're good.
Yeah.
I did.
Like, I knew the concept of it, but I'd never really seen it.
And I'm glad I didn't because it really gave me a chance to watch this and let this be
my first experience.
Yeah.
I had no idea going in just how, and I'm not trying to make a bad pun here, how weighty
it was as far as being very strong themes.
Yes.
The, the, the activism role that it took.
I'm just like, wow, I had no idea that was even a part of it.
I just thought it was some cheesy story about a little girl obsessed with a song and
dance show that she won the audition and be a part of.
And that's all I knew because that's all the movie I got through.
So the original one with the Ricky Lake and divine.
And I'm glad I'm glad I bailed on it because I don't know if I would have appreciated
what I saw last night as much had I had I totally agree with you on that.
There is a line that, you know, because segregation plays a key role in this, oh, Jasper's
joined us.
Hi, son.
Racism plays a very key role in this and how they say once a month on this show, they
have, and I hate, I don't want to use the term because it's not the term, but it's the
one that's very close to it for African-Americans.
It sounds fanatically.
Yes.
Yes.
Something day and being who we are, I leaned over to Charlotte and I said, that's not possible
because every day's Rusev day.
But that's a whole definition.
God.
But Charlotte was with us.
Your wife who's a British descent was with us.
I mean, this is, this is great on every level.
This is really is.
From a, first of all, the choreography alone, yeah, really, really solid in this.
Michelle Daddy had an energy level that I don't know if anybody else is thinking about
watching.
Yeah, you can.
She, she was a windmill.
And she really does encapsulate from what I've seen of the other productions, just, you
know, watching trailers or whatever, like she really does, like the role is hers, but
it's enough that it keeps it consistent with those that came before her, whether it
was Ricky Lake or Nikki Blonsky.
She was a true embodiment of that care.
She did a great job here.
I mean, this whole cast is solid.
I did something last night that I know that you've done before.
What's that?
And, and Jules and I did it for the first time.
We did this stay late.
Oh, yeah.
And this is the, the first time they've ever done this at the windspirit.
Usually they'll do this at the wily, but they don't always, I don't know if they've ever
done this at the windspirit before.
And what, what, what, what, chat is talking about that.
We did it the last time.
They did it the last time I thought you did it for the curious incident at the dog in
the next time.
No, no, no, you just missed the end of it.
That's different.
Oh, that wasn't a stay late thing?
No.
Oh, that was like, that was like an extra credit scene.
Oh, okay.
All right.
What they do usually at the wily is they'll have come early and they'll have stay late.
And if you get there early enough, they'll have some time where you can have a Q&A with
some members of the cast and crew and then they'll do it again afterwards, sometimes with
a different panel.
I've been able to do it a couple of times, but they did that here at the windspirit last
night.
We were graced with the presence of Liz McHill, motor mouth may be.
Oh, she was great.
And she was joined.
I'm looking her up real quick by one of the members of the ensemble.
She was John Sombl on this by Kirsten Roach.
She was basically just a singing voice backstage.
You never saw her on stage dancing or anything, but she was just backing vocal.
But she's from, she's a senior at Rowell at high school.
Oh, so you kind of got a book end of careers here because Liz went to Booker T. Washington.
Oh, right.
That's door to the windspirit.
I mean, her roots are right firmly planted here in Dallas.
Second show in a row where there's been a Booker T. Washington high school reference because
when we went saw Brightstar music done by E. Bracel also went to Booker T. Washington
as did Nore Jones.
I mean, she said she didn't graduate because she went to, she had to move to Houston before
she graduated.
But she did come back.
She finished out here and she signed her first contract with the Dallas Theater Center.
I think she said about 30 years ago.
Wow.
So, you know, she bleeds Dallas art.
And you could tell that her passion runs just as deep as her look for the city.
It's fashion her passion.
No.
Okay.
Although she was smartly dressed and she did mention something that I thought I picked
up on during the production during her big number.
Her dress split open in the back.
Did it really?
Yes.
Oh dear.
And she said that our crew backstage is so tight that they had it fixed before I realized
it was broken.
Wow.
So, you know, it was only like a 10 minute thing.
Yeah, they're not very long.
But I just thought it was really sweet how she kind of, she saw that that Kristen was standing
in the wings.
Kirsten, I'm sorry, not Kristen, Kirsten was standing in the wings and she motioned
for her.
And so she stood out there with her and then somebody brought her a chair and, you know,
it was kind of like a little bit of a back and forth.
And she just handed the mic over to Kirsten so Kirsten could tell her story of how she
was getting started and encouraging people that are interested to volunteer to donate their
time to help the, you know, to help the, the arts program to continue to flourish and to
encourage kids that are thinking about getting into it to just dive in, dive in, just follow
your dream.
You mentioned me, Kel, because if there's one thing about this musical that I felt was
kind of weird as much as I, as talented as she is and as amazing of a job as she did,
her number, I know where I've been, it's, it's so oddly different from everything else
in the production.
That particular number felt it was kind of shoehorned in there for me.
It turns into a full-blown gospel number, basically, but I don't think it would have had
the, the second act would have had the emotional weight without it.
Now, see, some of the speaking of that, something that Charlotte said to me as we were coming
home last night, she didn't dig the second act as much as she thought she would, that
she just told that it didn't have a good, good enough resolution for her.
I kind of see that point.
I, I do feel like the, well, heck, it's kind of hard to get into without giving too much
room.
But for me, I can see it.
That was a good playoff, but it was a great playoff.
There's a lot of like, hey, this is now a thing, and hey, this is now a thing, but that
didn't necessarily bother me.
It had kind of a Scooby-Doo ending to it without, without old man withers to work together
without somebody getting in there.
Yeah.
But it's a combination of being true to the time period it holds true to, and the time
period that the original production was done, it's a combination of those two things that
put it as a gospel song, that put it as an ending with kind of a Scooby-Doo ending with
the pretty bow on the package.
You've got to pull those two concepts in as well, because it's not a current show.
It was a time period piece made a few years back.
And do you, oh, go ahead, I'm sorry.
I was going to say, but it sounds like there's two different things going on now.
I wasn't at the show, and I've never seen an iteration of hairspray, so I'm coming
from a completely amateur point of view, with the way that that piece comes as a full
gospel, as you were saying, and with how the second act shifts gears from the sounds
of it.
Do you think it's more along the lines of it's done for dramatic effect to try and make
it stand out from the...
I don't know.
...it's the opening more peppy and light, and then the ending is more...
Everything else is more poppy.
I can't say it's a bad fit, it's so tonally different from how upbeat and jazzy everything
is, but that number was completely totally necessary, given the cause that they were standing
up for.
But the idea is, is it totally different because of that?
Yeah, probably.
They've got the second act to leave, people where they're going to leave, and they're
going to talk about what they've seen to try and make a change for a better world,
versus if it's just poppy, you're just, oh, that was a great show, yay, let's go on
with our life.
And if it leaves you with a little bit of heaviness to it, you're more likely to have a discussion
with your friends and family, you're more likely to try and be the change you want
to see in the world.
Interesting.
She had mentioned, Liz McKell had mentioned that whenever she first started playing the
role, she played it in St. Louis right after Ferguson.
Oh, wow.
So, you know, I mean, like, people were breaking down.
And there are certain references in here that are timeless, but also very pertinent.
And she also...
She had mentioned the manipulating the, she said, that's part of the script.
No, no, that doesn't surprise.
Absolutely part of the script, but the director said, give it a beat, float it out there,
and then let it simmer.
Yeah.
And I'm like, well played.
I was shocked a bit to how well that joke was received in this area of the country.
No, there were certain people around us that didn't take it all that well, as I noticed.
I didn't notice that, but I was noticed like overwhelmingly how well the crowd took it.
The folks who are immediate left did not like how certain things were going, and I'm
just like, really?
That's the role we live in.
Uh-huh.
I'm like, yeah, you're...
And there was even a moment...
Is your last name a Von Tussle by the chance?
There was also a moment in act two where things could have had the wheels shot off a little
bit.
But what happened, this crew, this cast and crew was so good, nobody even flinched.
Yeah.
I mean, it was noticeable, but you just kind of...
There was a transition where a set piece was a little too far to the front of the stage,
and the curtain got caught on it.
So because they were trying to transition literally from one location to another, and you
really couldn't do that without the curtain being pulled.
Nobody flinched, the people that were supposed to be in front of the curtain were still doing
the bit, even because I was even watching the people from the technical side of it because
we were behind the board.
The person behind the board, no problem, nobody moved, nobody panicked.
We just lifted the curtain and lowered it back down, and everything was fine.
It was very, very well done.
Although it was...
I mean, and I felt kind of bad for them because there was like, this is a little moment
where there...
Nothing was happening.
It was just...
That was...
That was an act one where there was this moment where like, there was probably a good
ten or fifteen seconds where everything on the stage was just dark.
And I don't know if there was a transition issue.
I think there was, because I kept noticing during the scene before that happened, the
curtain in the background on the far right hand side, it looked like they were trying
to pull it.
Like pull it on?
Maybe they weren't, but I kept noticing this motion, it looked like somebody was trying
to yank on it and pull it all the way back.
You know, the one I'm talking about is as we go into, out of the record, out of, I know
where I've been into, it's hairspray.
Yes, yeah.
Oh yeah.
But there was a moment in act one, two, where everything...
That's the moment I was talking about.
Because there was definitely an audience awkwardness of, are we supposed to do something?
And then everything just seemed to get right back on track, but again, there was never
a feeling of panic, there was never a feeling of, oh my God, what's going on here.
Like, everybody is the consummate professional.
Did you happen to see a first run of this show where they hadn't worked out those details
yet?
This was opening night.
This was opening night.
Okay, so it might have been their first go through and they misjudged some things.
Their first go through stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
But this is the touring stage.
You've worked in the theater on the technical side.
You know how every stage can be slightly different.
Right.
Well, she said they showed up for rehearsals like on the 29th and they've been working
non-stop and they had the fourth off and that was it.
I think the principal showed up like last week, everybody else showed up like the week
prior.
Can we just talk about the best number in the entire production?
You're timeless to me.
I was crying, Lafford.
That's one of the funniest things I've seen on that stage.
It's the Edna Wilber duet that is just like the chemistry with the two of them is so
good and it's so casual and so relaxed that every joke hit right on the money if you
could hear it because you were still laughing from the one that came right before it.
That was my favorite part of the whole thing.
I'm not going to lie to you.
I lean forward and look at you dead.
You weren't looking at me.
But as soon as I heard the words, mozzled off, I went, uh-huh.
There you go.
This is beautiful.
What is that?
Tell me.
That was absolutely silly.
I can hear the bells.
It's the other great moment for me too.
The way it's choreographed if nothing else.
Welcome to the 60s.
Also a great number where they're going to the store.
It's just this is such a great musical.
It's got a great message to it but it doesn't beat you over the head with the message.
The message is there.
You know the message is there but it doesn't try to get all preaching in your face which
I also respected about this.
And they get a very easily done that.
Any other questions that you guys have for us with the final analysis?
I got nothing.
I, because I haven't, have no basis on this, I would only say let's get to the, uh- assessment
from the people that saw it.
Here's how this- go ahead, Jim.
I'm sorry.
And I happen to like the show itself so I would say if there's a chance to go see it,
go see it.
Oh yeah.
Here's how it's going to work.
Chad and I are going to have two questions at maximum.
Question number one is would we see this production again if the answer is no then we're
done here.
But if the answer is yes then the follow up is going to be, since this is a stage production
how far are we willing to go to see it?
And so basically we're going to say where would we sit because the closer you sit the higher
of a ticket price.
Chad would you see hairspray again?
Heck yes.
Where are you sitting?
Hold on, hold on.
Okay.
Where are you sitting?
That sweet spot that we discovered, I should, I forgot what I named it now.
I don't remember.
But you know what I'm talking about, yeah, oh yeah, it's probably, oh, five, six rows
in front of the sound board.
All right.
I would definitely see this again as well.
I would say just get in the building.
The river dance position.
The river dance position.
Just get in the building.
There's not a bad seat, especially if you're going to see it the wind spear, not a bad
seat in that entire place.
Yeah.
I got an email today as a matter of fact saying that there were, there's going to be days
where they had $25 rush tickets.
So this not going to be an expensive night if you can catch the right showings, go see
this production.
It's only going to be here for a week.
But the reason that we do this is we also want the entire end prior around the world
to know if this comes to your particular town, go check out hairspray.
And again, thanks to everybody at the AT&T Performing Arts Center, the wind spear opera
house, Cindy, everybody over there.
Thank you guys so much for letting us come hang out on press night.
And you know, we feel important every once again.
All right.
Let's do the plugs.
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The official fact checker of this show is Don Ford.
You can email, you can find him, follow him, and Fondango, Tuesday, A's at the beginning,
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I am Chad at theclubhousepodcast.com.
Charlotte Parker is on Pinterest because we're morally obligated to say that.
Jules Womens at the house, just chilling.
Faithworth is with Don, Don's on vacation.
Yes, yes.
Having a great time up there in Pittsburgh, saw some pictures from them.
You mean Margaritaville?
Yes, that's where they are right now.
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So until next time, for Alex, for General Room, for Chad and the Empire, I'm Rob, clubhouse
is closed.
You could put Britney Palmer in the television version.
I'm just saying, even the movie version, that would be fine too.