I have known of Hairspray songs since I was a teenager doing drama school however I never actually watched the film, so giving it a go as an adult, does it really hold up as well as people claim or is it just a bit too fluffy?

Hairspray follows a young woman call Tracy who lives with her mum and dad who have steady, normal lives but nothing too exciting. Her and her best friend are obsessed with a local dance show and one day the show invites normal people on to become a new dancer. Tracy is immediately pushed aside due to her weight however when the male love interest of the film, Link, sees her dancing in detention with the black students he immediately says she has to join the cast and this starts the spiral of a very white washed show becoming more integrated and more accepting.

This whole film is about the 60s and how people who were not this perfect white specimen are cast aside and seen as lesser. Not only do we have the segregation of the black students against the white but also the fact that Tracy is fat and seen as unappealing means that she too is put into the same bracket as everyone else that isn’t as desirable. It’s nice to see that through this movie times do change, things happen and the bigoted cast members get their comeuppance whereas the ones that were segregated and look down upon get the chance to shine.

I will be honest I did find Tracy’s singing voice very jarring, it wasn’t the easiest to listen to and any time she started singing I did cringe a little trying to get through it. However I cannot say the same for other cast members and I did enjoy a lot of the songs that were presented, even if some did drag on a bit longer than I thought they needed to.

I also really enjoyed the casting choices, having John Travolta as the mum was really funny to watch and makes you wonder what his motivations for doing it were. Queen Latifah of course was absolutely incredible and I can listen to her sing forever, and even Zac Efron as the love interest made perfect sense because around this time he was everywhere and was the poster child for attractive men. So while I did have some issues with this film, overall it was really enjoyable, and while I won’t listen to a lot of the songs back there are some that will get stuck in my head and I won’t be mad at that.

However the rewatch-ability of this film, I’m unsure whether it’s really there. I enjoyed it as I said but it wasn’t anything groundbreaking, and so maybe if someone else recommended watching it I would happily do so, but in my own time it’s not something that I would rush to watch again because it just didn’t have that excitement for me. However the thought of going to see it on stage definitely does excite me as I’d love to see how other cast members play these roles and how they are performed on stage, and so if I knew it was coming to a theatre near me I would definitely be up for watching it there, however in movie form I’m happy to keep it on the shelf.

What do you think of Hairspray?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding