Word: broadway
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...temporarily eliminated the Memorial Drive shuttle stop—shuttles are instead stopping at Broadway and Quincy Streets...
...four-letter one: buzz. Since its August 22nd opening, to enthusiastic reviews, "Hairspray" - based on John Waters' 1988 film about the attempts of one chunky girl to integrate a "Bandstand"-like TV dance party in Baltimore - has fulfilled its box-office promise. Last week it was one of two Broadway musicals playing to capacity audiences (the other was "Mamma...
...would be hitting the million-dollar mark. But don't fret for the show's backers. The cast has no above-the-title names - the most prominent figure is Harvey Fierstein, the bullfrog-voiced actor who goes into drag to play the heroine's oversize mother, and whose previous Broadway performance (in his 1987 comedy "Safe Sex") lasted all of one week - so ticket sales aren't siphoned into star salaries. And the show is peddling CDs, T shirts and geegaws galore. At Bloomingdale's, in its 59th Street store and other locations, you will find "Hairspray" boutiques festooned with...
...much tribute to the early 60s as parody of it. He loved the old songs, loved the dances that accompanied them - the Madison, the Twist, the Continental, the Fly, the Roach - and in his film reproduced a dozen of them, with an archaeologist's fidelity. For the Broadway version Waters is listed as "consultant"; he claims he was much too bossy ever to collaborate. He also knew that the shoe would have "new" songs; the pastiche conceit embraced not only the ransacking of tacky 50s-60s modes of decor, coiffure and couture but the rephrasing of less-than-classic Brill...
...Shaiman has written a few generic Broadway tunes, in the High Generic mode - simple, singable, reverberative, just like Brooks' songs for "The Producers." And toward the end of the show he seems to realize he's run out of early-60s musical signatures to filch from. So in the last two songs he steals from 70s retro-rock. "Cooties" is nothing but Steve Martin's "King Tut." The finale, which brings the entire female company together to sing "You Can't Stop the Beat," begins as yet another Spector classic, "River Deep Mountain High," the raids pretty much the entire...