Review: Hairspray, Main School Hall, Lower Site, All Saints School, York (From York Press)

Review: Hairspray, Main School Hall, Lower Site, All Saints School, York

10:56am Thursday 9th February 2012 in Theatre By Charles Hutchinson

TAKING up an invitation to review a school production was a fascinating one-off experience.

Performing in a secondary school show is the bridge between the tentative first steps of the one-for-all and all-for-one Nativity play and youth theatre and the summer school, and it is a chance for raw talent to blossom.

Team play and self-expression, a boost to confidence, discipline, a palpable sense of achievement, mental and physical exercise: what a wonderful thing is the school play, right down to the directors being credited as Miss Clark and Miss Glenn rather than by their first name.

Given the profusion of teenage roles, Hairspray is a good choice for such a show, even if the Broadway musical’s theme of black-and-white segregation in early 1960s Baltimore is not the easiest to cast in any York school.

All Saints’ “twist” on that theme is to still tell the story of a divided community, but now with the division between the “perfectly preened uptown television stars of the Corny Collins Show and the funky downtown kids who dance to their own beat”.

It is a practical solution, one that works well in its distinction between the Fifties’ status-quo squares and the freer-thinking Sixties’ downtowners, drawn to a new brand of music and a desire for integration, expressed in the exuberant ensemble dancing to the choreography of Miss Taylor and Mrs Couldry.

John Waters’ flamboyant, nostalgic musical spoof tells the story of teen rebel Tracy Turnblad (a supremely assured, suitably quirky Tori Klays). She is determined to prove that “fat girls can dance” as she takes on the segregation policy that excludes her like and the black community from appearing in the TV talent contest introduced by Corny Collins (Dan Lucas, slick and sharp in what is apparently his first lead role. One to watch).

On the “out” side of the divide are Tracy; her outspoken mum (Oliver Heaton, wonderfully entertaining in the show’s infamously frank cross-dressing role); excitable best friend Penny Pingleton (an endlessly energetic and humorous Emma Dubruel); hip black pupil Seaweed J Stubbs (Isaiah Gimba, handsome, sweet soul voiced and a cool mover); and the sage, gospel-singing Motormouth Maybelle (Becky Turley, in a mature performance in one of the adult roles).

On the “in” but insular side are desperately wannabe pageant queen Amber (a ruthless Katherine Warren, with the aptly cold eyes) and her bigoted mother, the show’s intolerable and insufferable producer Velma Von Tussle (Abby Sutton, a vision in pink disdain and superiority).

Torn between pin-up Amber and irrepressible Tracy is the show’s Elvis-in-the-making, Link Larkin (Joe Sample, the most understated but just right turn in the show).

As ever, you are looking to spot talent on the rise, and here you are spoilt for choice: in particular Abby Sutton, Emma Dubruel, Dan Lucas and Isaiah Gimba, whose performance of Run And Tell That announces a showman in the making. The likes of York Stage Musicals director Robert Readman should come calling.

•Hairspray, Main School Hall, Lower Site, All Saints School, York, last performance tonight at 7pm (sold out).