Word: hairspray
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...Travolta's Edna Turnblad is the heart of Hairspray, Elijah Kelley's Seaweed J. Stubbs is the hips--the kind of boy who makes teenage girls nearly choke on their lollipops or want to join him in detention. That's where Seaweed teaches kids, white and black, including Tracy (Nikki Blonsky), all the fun dances. With his strenuous, just-naughty-enough performance of the number Run and Tell That!, Kelley, 20, emerges as a Hollywood throwback--a charismatic young actor who sings and dances. Kelley is in talks to star in a biopic of the young Sammy Davis...
...Travolta-the sultry young stud of Saturday Night Fever and Grease, the wily thug of Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty and Face/Off-hasn't been up close with another guy recently. In his new movie, Hairspray, based on the 1988 John Waters comedy and the 2002-Tony-winning musical, he does a funny-passionate dance with Christopher Walken. And Walken leads. Travolta, walking in the pumps of Divine in the earlier film and Harvey Fierstein on Broadway, plays Edna Turnblad, the beyond-zaftig Baltimore mom of a '60s teenage girl who dreams of appearing on a local TV dance show. (Walken...
...next few weeks is Once, a scrappy, Irish guy-meets-girl yarn made for less than $200,000 and featuring Glen Hansard, the lead singer of the Dublin rock band The Frames as a busker/vacuum repairman trying to launch a recording career singing on street corners. In July comes Hairspray, with newcomer Nikki Blonsky, 18, and old-comers John Travolta and Michelle Pfeiffer (shout-out to Grease 2 fans!) in a cinematic take on the Tony-winning Broadway musical, which was itself a showy take on the 1988 John Waters cult film about teens in a dance contest in Civil...
...PRESENT LIFE IN THE KEY OF ME ME ME In Hairspray, Blonsky and Travolta, who is in drag here as Edna Turnblad in the role Harvey Fierstein played on stage, are sassy mother-daughter spokes-models for plus-size empowerment. "You have to find a theme that contemporary audiences relate to," says Neil Meron, producer of Hairspray and the 2002 film Chicago. "Hairspray is about body image, racial tolerance, what constitutes a family." Think Oprah's Live Your Best Life tour, with a beat and bigger hair...
...American Idol's Simon Cowell, whose chest cavity apparently developed without a heart inside, rooted for Jennifer Hudson's soulful singer Effie in last year's Dreamgirls. All good movie musicals give us a lovable character to invest in - in Once it's Hansard's tender, awkward busker, in Hairspray Blonsky's cheerful teen reformer and Travolta's well-intentioned big momma. Contrast these huggable characters with, say, 2005's Rent, which celebrates broke, dysfunctional pseudo bohemians who you wish would just shut...