Shake a tail feather
John Waters's Hairspray teases the hell out of Middle America, leaving it a pretty pleasant place.

By Robert Avila

AT A RECENT exhibit of haute schlock filmmaker John Waters's photographic work at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan, his three earliest short films screened in three small, very dark rooms off the main gallery. The screening rooms had an appropriately sleazy aspect to them, probably unintentional, sort of like porn alcoves. None of these films had been seen since they first "premiered" in Baltimore in the mid-'60s. My favorite is called "Eat My Makeup," but the first one chronologically, "Hag in a Black Leather Jacket," is more interesting in the current context.

It's a Super 8 film he made with some friends at his parents' house in Baltimore in 1964, when Waters was a senior in high school. Utterly amateurish and physically timeworn, it still manages a charm that prefigures much of the work to come. Set to a collage soundtrack hefty with Motown and R&B, the narrative wends its hallucinatory way to a suitably risqué climax: an interracial marriage on top of the house conducted by a white-hooded minister. This is followed by a triumphal nuptial joyride in which newlyweds and guests eat smashed wedding cake off the roof of the sedan. Where are they heading? Clearly wherever. And their supreme confidence tells you they'll make, and get, their own way there too.

Fast-forward 40 years and that ugly Super 8 duckling has become a trashy swan on Broadway. Youthful irreverence and jubilant disdain for the square, race-coded respectability screwed down tight on an otherwise happening decade have traveled straight from the white Baltimore suburbs to the deftly choreographed mayhem of Hairspray now on display at the Golden Gate Theatre. (Although "straight" is probably the wrong word.)

In slightly sanitized Waters fashion, Hairspray's heroine, Tracy Turnblad (a winning Keala Settle), brings boundless energy to her awkward teenage years in racially segregated 1962 Baltimore, where she lives with her parents (a modest, circus-like couple played with great aplomb by comedy veterans Bruce Vilanch and Todd Susman) and dreams of becoming a TV star on the local American Bandstand-style Corny Collins Show. In her way stand the guardians of good taste – represented by the show's reigning darling, Amber Von Tussle (Jordan Ballard), and her Gestapo-like producer-mother (Susan Cella) – and the racial segregation that keeps black and white kids from dancing together on air, a fact that finds a receptive nerve in our plump and hair-challenged outsider. Oozing pure teen-animal enthusiasm, Tracy leads her friends from the margins into the mainstream, upsetting the applecart of privileged white Baltimore. If the conflation of high school pecking orders and the legacy of white supremacy seems trivializing as recounted here, believe me it's even more trivial in the middle of a musical comedy – but for all that, the cartoon characters are wonderfully human too, and the moral is sound enough.

One could gripe a little. The show flies out the gate with a gleefully raucous opener that feels a little pushy. I for one would have preferred a little foreplay. But things fall into place fast. Director Jack O'Brien keeps us rolling on fine performances, clever and rousing songs, and inventive choreography. Meanwhile, the inimitable bons mots of Waters (as in Mom to Tracy: "You want to be famous? Learn how to get blood out of car upholstery") provide the perfect grease for the whole wheel. (And Grease is the word.)

Even longtime fans of "the Pope of Trash" must think it's pretty weird that he has a musical on Broadway. Then again, you can see how, sometime between The Producers and Urinetown, an impresario of the Great White Way must have had an epiphany. And darn if the movie (released in 1988) doesn't make for a big, fun stage show. It's still weird, though. Not that trash should be the stuff of Broadway (naturally) but that a devil-may-care misfit like Waters should turn out so teleological.

In 1964 an unknown Baltimore high school senior joins a larger movement of race rebels (one supposes rather instinctually, like Tracy) by desegregating Baltimore and America on-screen – albeit a screen that almost nobody, let alone someone of a "respectable" mien, would view. Today the lauded camp artiste re-creates the same period in order to desegregate it all over again, this time on the culture's greatest theatrical stage, as a Broadway musical. (Race relations aside, could anyone have imagined that in 1964?)

And if the end has always been a good time, the almost incidental message turns out to be anything but dated. Especially now, Amber's hopeless grip on the reins of privilege (as the normative beauty of a dominant middle-class white culture in serious denial) reflects almost poignantly the desperation of those who today cling to some "natural order" between their "America" and the rest of the world. Amber's perplexity is theirs: Are we not the world's ideal? Are we not therefore entitled to special treatment and special treats? Then as now, such thinking amounts to a mad attempt at maintaining a gloriously silly but ultimately stupid and boring perfection – like holding a gaudy Cadillac of a coiffure in place with monsoons of ozone-smashing aerosol. We're saved only by those driven to make the most sensible nonsense out of it.

'Hairspray' runs through July 3. Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 2 p.m. (starting June 21, runs Mon.-Sat., 8 p.m.; also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.), Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor, S.F. $39-$81. (415) 512-7770, www.ticketmaster.com.