Music Lyrics Mash Theme

Review: 'Hairspray' hits the mark in Matunuck

MATUNUCK - The theme of Theatre By The Sea's 2011 season is best described in the words of last year's hit "Little Shop of Horrors": "the meek are gonna get what's coming to them, by and by."  Both "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" and "Man of La Mancha" celebrated outsiders on a quest. "Hairspray," playing through Aug. 13, hums the same tune, but with an irresistible energy and beat that makes it the "don't miss" hit of the season.

The outsiders in "Hairspray" include overweight teenager Tracy Turnblad (Erin McCracken) and the black community in1960s Baltimore. By the sheer strength of her sunny personality and funky dance moves, Tracy integrates the very popular, and very white, "Corny Collins Show." Along the way, she wins the heart of the most popular boy around, Link Larkin (Zach Trimmer).  The cheerful opener, "Good Morning Baltimore," sets the tone as the irrepressible Tracy awakens in her family's apartment on the wrong side of town and belts a greeting to the colorful characters outside her father's joke shop on her way to school. McCracken plays Tracy with a big vision, a big heart, and not an ounce of schmaltz or saccharine. She is spot on - and it's impossible not to cheer for her every dance step of the way. Tracy and her friend, Penny, (Prout graduate Alexa Shanahan) race home after school to twist and mash potato along with "The Corny Collins Show" on the tiny black-and-white TV in the Turnblads' living room. Nearby, Tracy's mother, Edna, (Tom Gleadow) irons the day away. Shanahan captures the giggly giddiness of Penny as she swoons over TV heartthrobs while longing to find the boy of her dreams.  Last seen as crime boss Don Marco in Arlene Violet and Enrico Garzilli's mob musical, "The Family," Gleadow is clearly relishing his role as the matriarch of the Turnblad family. In padding, wig and housedress, Gleadow portrays Edna as a nice woman who loves her dance-crazy teen and adores her quirky husband, Wilbur, (Sean McGuirk). McGuirk and Gleadow share a vaudeville-style duet, "You're Timeless to Me" that keeps the audience in stitches. Thanks to detention - her sky-high hairdo keeps those behind her from seeing the chalkboard - Tracy meets Seaweed J. Stubbs (Antonio Tillman), a dancer on the "Corny Collins Show's Negro Day." Seaweed teaches Tracy the moves she needs to stand out at her audition, and Tracy, indignant that her new friends can't dance on the show every day, hatches a plan. Tillman, like McCracken, is a joy to watch. His song "Run and Tell That" has a verve and sexiness reminiscent of the young André DeShields strutting through "Y'All Got It!" in "The Wiz." It's easy to see why Penny risks the wrath of her nutty, racist mother (Stacey Geer) to date Seaweed. Tracy wows Corny and wins a spot on the show despite the disdain and insults of the show's bigoted producer, Velma Von Tussle (Rebecca Gibel) and her daughter, Amber, (Rosalie Burke), Link's girlfriend and the self-appointed star of the "Corny Collins Show." Gibel, who starred in Trinity Rep's "Camelot," shows her range, going from Queen Guinevere to "Miss Baltimore Crabs" with aplomb. Tracy is successful in winning Link's heart, but integrating Corny's show proves more difficult until Seaweed's mom and the host of "Negro Day," Motormouth Maybelle (Yvette Monique Clark), rallies the crowd and brings the house down with her rousing and moving number "I Know Where I've Been." In a moment that could grind the show to a halt if it comes off as preachy, Clark stops the show in the best way possible, with the thunderous applause of an audience impressed with how well her big voice and bigger spirit embodied the heart of the show. The bouncy and tuneful music and lyrics by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman capture the feel of pop music from the "American Bandstand" era while retaining a traditional Broadway score. The colorful costumes (by Marcia Zammarelli) transport the audience back to an era when it was cool to balance the size of your hips with the width of your hair. Scenic designer Bert Scott offers an eye-popping set that moves as nimbly as the dancers. And finally, director and choreographer Russell Garrett deserves a round of applause for fitting a big cast into a small space so skillfully that we don't feel as constricted as Edna after she squeezes into her pettipants. Further, Garrett reins in the kitsch just a smidge, allowing the characters to find living color instead of two-dimensional figures better suited for that tiny TV set at the Turblads'.

New Mixtape! – “Bright Grey Sky (pt 1)” « the ashtray says

I’ve gotten out of the habit of making “mixtapes” (that is, 40-80 minute playlists that have nothing to do with actual magnetic tape), and I think it’s just great fun, so when the urge to put one together recently possessed me, I followed it. Often, my mixes are built around a single song with some sonic element that strikes a chord with me, and then I try to put together a list of others that share that same element — one of my favorites that I’ve made was all built around Deerhunter’s “Nothing Ever Happened”, but that one exists only on some long lost burned CD somewhere…maybe it’ll turn up one day. Anyway, the connection between the songs may be pretty vague, so it may only be apparent to me, but I think it’s a nice way to put together a mix regardless.

The starting point for this one was Real Estate’s “Snow Days”, the closer off their self-titled album, and a song which took a while to grab hold of me. When I started combing through my library for songs that share what I love about “Snow Days”, the list got quite long, so I decided to make this one a two-parter. Maybe I’m overexplaining this, but the way I perceive all these songs is that they’re somewhat melancholy or disaffected but are still pleasingly melodic and have a warm mood to them. That description could be lent to literally millions of songs, but it’s as specific as I can get about the connection these songs have in my mind.

Important Side Note: I’ve been interested lately in the gaps between the various emotional layers a song may have for each of us. The lyrical content could be “sad” but the music might not sound it — The Shins are a great example of this. Or both music and lyrics might be depressive, but listening to it might not make us so. The National are a “sad” band but I do not feel sad when I listen to them. This can have a lot to do with the catharsis that comes out of the sadness in the work of a band like The National, but it also has to do with our own personal associations with that music. People may listen to sad music when they are sad, either for that catharsis or for a sense that they are not alone in that feeling, or they may listen to “happy” music to pick them up. ( This very good column touches on that.) I’ve listened to The National during some good times in my life, and those are the feelings conjured when I listen to them, despite the general tone of their work. I’m sure this is true for many, many people, but something about the way I process music — I’m not a hugely lyric-centric guy, for one thing, and my choice of what to listen to is less affected by my “mood” than some friends I’ve talked to — makes the mood of a song particularly divorced from my own emotional associations with it. Expect a post with more on this sometime soon.

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