Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield – until 19 October 2024
Reviewed by Alison Beaumont
4****
Hairspray is set in 1962 in Baltimore. It tells the story of Tracy Turnbland, an oversized teenager, who has a dream of dancing on “The Corny Collins Show”. Tracy’s signature big bouffant hair leads her to get detention with the African-American students in the school. Whilst in detention they teach her some of their dance moves. These new moves win her a place on The Corny Collins Show and overnight she becomes a star. She faces bullying from the producer, Velma and her popular daughter, Amber. Tracy uses her newfound fame to promote racial integration on the television show and eventually succeeds in her mission. Tracy Turnblad teaches everyone to look past the colour of skin and fight for every human being’s equal rights.
Tracy Turnblad is played by Katie Brace and Alexandra Emmerson-Kirby and in this performance, we had the pleasure of being entertained by Katie Brace. Katie portrayed the character well and showed lots of energy.
In this performance there were quite a few changes with understudies stepping into the roles. Olly Manley stepped into the role of Link, Shemar Jarrett played Seaweed, Sasha Monique the role of Motormouth, Ryan Appiah-Sarpong was Gilbert and Shaniquah played one of the Dynamite’s. With all the changes this did lead to there only being two performers in Dynamite group instead of three.
Some of the vocals during the performance were a little bit poor but considering all the changes I think the cast did a really good job.
In the musical Edna Turnblad is always played by a male and my favourite part of the show was when Edna Turnblad (Neil Hurst) and Wilbur Turnblad (Dermot Canavan) did “You’re Timeless To Me”. Both characters throughout the performance had the audience in laughter, they had improvised jokes and really had a connection with each other, and you could see they really did enjoy performing.
The best vocal performance by far was Sasha Monique when she sang “I Know Where I’ve Been”, this truly was amazing, she reminded me of Whitney Houston.
The costumes were bright and colourful and the dancing was energetic.