Michael Ball as Edna Turnblad
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It’s Monday evening, 72 hours before the West End production of
Hairspray is going to give its first preview performance in front of a paying public, and the Shaftesbury Theatre is abuzz with activity. The stalls are given over to various consoles staffed with technicians busy checking the numerous lighting cues, while stagehands are kept occupied under the proscenium arch itself hammering and drilling into place some of the more spectacular set pieces of David Rockwell’s exuberant design. Backstage, cast members can be heard whooping their anticipation for what will be the first proper run-through of the Tony-winning musical that same evening with full costumes, wigs and a 12-piece band. And keeping a keen, smiling eye on proceedings is the musical’s director, Jack O’Brien, who is among the many considerable talents on hand to ensure that a stage show set in Baltimore in the early 1960s resonates in London.
“It explains itself,” O’Brien says of a show that has taken five years to cross the Atlantic and is now doing so with a very deliberately all-British cast, headed by Michael Ball as Edna Turnblad and 22-year-old newcomer Leanne Jones as Edna's daughter, Tracy. “We’ve found in an odd way that as fragile as that book is, it explains itself at every step of the way. I mean, it’s not as if people are in the dark ages over here. Just as we don’t have to explain a lot of things when a Tom Stoppard play comes over to New York—apart,” he smiles, “from some of the words—they certainly get the context of Hairspray here. We had a couple of references that might be different, that sound different, and Mel [co-star Mel Smith, who plays Wilbur Turnblad] said, ‘Stop it, we all go to the movies, we all see TV, we know your culture as well as you know ours. We accept it for what it is’”
Hairspray director Jack O'Brien
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Upstairs in his dressing room, leading lady (!) Michael Ball cheerfully nurses a cold and expands on his director’s point. “Because we’re all steeped in American lore, we all get it; we all absolutely get it. There were a couple of things on the first read-through, and what was amazing was just how small was the number of things that people didn’t know.” The word “cooties,” for example. The subject of some debate was a reference to the Von Tussles shaking their “fanny muscles”—that last a problematic phrase in a country, namely Britain, where “fanny” means something dramatically different from what it does in the U.S. “So they came back with ‘tushy,’ and then it was, like, ‘No, fanny!’ ‘Tushy!’ ‘Fanny!’ Tushy!’” Ball laughs. “How about pushy or tanny? So now it’s ‘fanny;’ we’re keeping ‘fanny.’” The actor has never been to Baltimore but doesn’t think that matters when it comes to enjoying a show that he saw not long after it opened on Broadway. Indeed, as part of his radio presence on the BBC as a Broadway commentator of sorts, there hasn’t been much in New York that Ball hasn’t seen. (He jokes about playing Melchior in
Spring Awakening, and the fact of the matter is that—in the face, at least—he somewhat resembles an older Jonathan Groff.)
“Hairspray was the best show of that season that I saw. I came out of the theatre thinking, I would have been thrilled to have paid and have had an evening’s entertainment of that: what a great Rolls Royce of a show.” Did he then set about putting himself forward for a London production? “I thought, I would love to play that part, but they would never consider me for that role in England, and they wouldn’t have five years ago. What changed it was The Woman in White. Coming and doing that, having a success with that, people thought, ‘Oh, Michael Ball does character roles.’” The actor laughs. “Now that’s probably all I’ll ever do again. And the fact is—I could not be happier.”
The mood at the theatre is one of the best sort of nervous anticipation, as the creative team await the one component that has so far been absent from the process: an audience. “The problem with a show like this is an audience is its lifeblood,” says Ball, who should know whereof he speaks: already this year, the performer has starred in Kismet at the English National Opera and made his debut at the Royal Albert Hall Proms, all the while continuing his concert career.
Michael Ball and Mel Smith
as Edna and Wilbur Turnblad
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“You can rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, but your timing won’t come until you have an audience and suddenly the things that you and the rest of the cast thought were hysterical because all your mates are there laughing at it die in the audience and things that you never knew were funny suddenly pop out because it’s that learning curve.” Ball directs the point very much toward his occupancy of a role originated on stage by Harvey Fierstein and played in the recent film version by John Travolta. What Ball wants, he grins, is an audience to tell him, “Am I just a bit of a prat in a woman’s outfit, in which case I start losing confidence and we’re all just going to have a ‘Springtime For Hitler’ moment?” Or, more likely, is this the part that could take a onetime
jeune premier, in O’Brien’s Gallic estimation of his star, toward the adult roles that will ensure a lengthy career? “Michael wanted to play [Edna] in the worst way and came in and actually read for it,” notes the director. “He’s got a wider range of parts now and a wide range of appeal, and then there’s adorable Mel Smith, who’s what we’ve been aiming at all this time with Wilbur. We’re in hog heaven.”
Still, the proof will be in the doing, which is why general manager Rebecca Quigley is very much in view, scurrying about the same theatre where she previously worked on The Who’s Tommy—which was not a London success. The difference this time, she maintains, is that “the creative team have opened the show elsewhere, they’ve done it before, they know what they’re doing, they know this works. It’s tried and tested.” (Indeed, this is the fifth time O'Brien has directed a show that is in fact opening concurrently in Johannesburg, that incarnation watched over by O’Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell’s ongoing Hairspray team.) What about the recent film: is that a help or hindrance? “There are more people knowing it as a brand name; the film makes it bigger,” says Quigley, while co-star Rachel Wooding, who plays Amber Von Tussle, says, “I think a lot of people saw the movie, and I think that will make people come."
Wooding, 29 but cast in the amiably villainous part of someone half her age, speaks particularly of relishing the creative synergy that comes from a British company working as one with an American creative team. “From day one, everybody’s had to step up a gear because I think we’re naturally on the back foot; as British people we sort of ease our way in whereas the Americans were on it straight away.” Besides, although Wooding grew up well away from Baltimore in Yorkshire, she understands implicitly the importance of location to the show. “We can relate to that because in England we’ve got so many different places; you can just go down the road, and the accents are different and the people there have their ways.” From Baltimore to Barnsley might sound a sizable leap, but if Hairspray can cross that divide, it should be keeping its London participants in curlers for some time to come.