'Hairspray' overcomes missed line
Play review
By Cary Ginell soundthink@aol.com

It's something that every stage actor fears: losing control or focus in the middle of a performance.

That moment happened in last week's opening night staging of the hit musical "Hairspray," which began a brief six-show run at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza early last week. During the hilarious but charming duet between husband and wife Wilbur and Edna Turnblad, "(You're) Timeless To Me," somebody forgot his line. Whether it was Dan Ferretti, who played gagmaster Wilbur, or Jerry O'Boyle in the cross-dressing role of Edna doesn't matter. The way the two actors handled the dilemma and the audience's response are what makes live musical theater the exciting art form it's been for more than a century.

From my vantage point it appeared that O'Boyle missed a lyric. Instead of singing, "We got a kid who's blowin' the lid off the Turnblad family tree," he sang "family home." Ferretti, under stress to find something to sing to rhyme with "home," could only blurt out "Shabbat shalom!" This set O'Boyle off on a laughing jag that he struggled to control.

The orchestra was holding its note . . . longer and longer, waiting for O'Boyle to sing his next cue. The two then traded a few hilarious ad-libs while the audience screamed in hysterics. O'Boyle was literally shaking with laughter in his oversized dress, desperately trying to find his way back to the song. Finally, they got back on track and finished the number to a tumultuous ovation.

Theater League's national touring company of "Hairspray" didn't need that little bit of actor's agony to be a big hit. The group put on a slam-bang production of the selfproclaimed "big fat musical comedy hit" written by Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan that won eight Tony awards and recently spawned a motion picture version starring John Travolta as Edna.

The fact of the matter is that 1962 wasn't this peppy, this tuneful or this memorable. It was one of the last years before the Beatles invaded America, and the wild, unbridled rock 'n' roll craze of the '50s had been sanitized into an army of perfectly coiffed Bobby Rydells.

But songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman used the Phil Spector "girl group" sound to come up with an invigorating score of infectious songs (typified by "I'm a Big Girl Now") that just doesn't quit.

The risqué lines that pop up, not just in the script but in the songs as well, only amplify the brilliance of this seemingly "harmless" satire on race relations, pop music and high school attitudes in the televisionobsessed early 1960s.

The cast was uniformly fabulous. Highlights included Brooklynn Pulver's giggly butterball of fire, Tracy Turnblad; Christian White's wiry Seaweed J. Stubbs; Sharon Malane, wonderful as a stand-in Penny Pingleton; and Angela Birchett as the rhymespouting, Etta Jamesinspired Motormouth Maybelle.

But the star of the show was O'Boyle, whose turn at Edna was, shall we say, larger than life and 10 times as funny.

This production of "Hairspray" was worth all the fluorocarbons sprayed into the Thousand Oaks air.