Hairspray in Vegas: Trimming a Tony Winner for a Move to the Strip

With announcements of the imminent Las Vegas transfers of Hairspray, The Phantom of the Opera and Spamalot, a lot of attention has been paid to Broadway musicals making their way to the strip in 90-minute intermission-less versions. The practice is far from new. While current Sin City mountings of Broadway hits Avenue Q and Mamma Mia! last over two hours, abbreviated tuners often referred to as "tab versions" are the norm in the casino capital, with such hits as Hello, Dolly! and Mame playing there in that form decades ago. But how does a creative team decide what part of its precious show should be sheared on its way to Nevada? Broadway.com offers an examination of the process used to whip Hairspray, the 2003 Tony Award winner for Best Musical, into shape for its February 6 start at the Luxor Las Vegas.

GOOD MORNING BALTIMORE LITE
The Hairspray team was approached by producers Michael Gill and Myron Martin who are not involved in the New York production in late 2004 about bringing a shortened version of the show to Las Vegas. "When they proposed it to us, we all sat there shocked," Hairspray composer and co-lyricist Marc Shaiman told Broadway.com. "But just as my brain was saying, ‘How dare you?,' I was thinking of ways to do it. Obviously, I like to think Hairspray is all A-plus moments, but there are a few that are maybe B-minus, so we could trim those. Vegas didn't want to do it unless we could do it this way. So I figured, let's see if we can do it, and if we can't, then fuck it."

The writers met a few times as a group to discuss possible script changes, quickly agreeing to take out the first scene inside the Baltimore Women's House of Detention that opens Act II in the Broadway Hairspray and the songs "The Big Dollhouse" and the reprise of "Good Morning Baltimore." That move alone eliminated eight pages from the script which in its Broadway form is 113 pages long. "It is women in jail—if you're doing John Waters you want to go to one of his favorite places," Mark O'Donnell, who co-wrote the Hairspray book with Thomas Meehan, laughed. "But we don't need it for the story as a whole."

After that big decision was made, the creatives separated into camps. Work began in January 2005 with an April Fool's Day deadline in mind.

SETTLING THE SCORE
"We had to musically figure out how to lose a verse here or there and what to cut," Shaiman explained. "I had one plane ride where I literally sat there with a stop watch and sang songs to myself. As we were landing in Los Angeles, I had figured it out."

"The Big Dollhouse" and the "Good Morning Baltimore" reprise are not the only songs missing from the Vegas version. The mother-daughter villainess characters of Velma and Amber Von Tussle will have less opportunities to croon. "Cooties," Amber's campy final number, has been chopped, as has "The Legend of Miss Baltimore Crabs," Velma's big solo, and its short reprise, "Velma's Revenge." "'Baltimore Crabs' always plagued us because the response to it has never been like the response to the rest of the score," Shaiman said of the cut. "Now [Velma] will only sing in the very last verse of ‘You Can't Stop the Beat.' This way it allows us to cast the role with someone who isn't a great singer. It opens the casting possibilities to name stars, people who fit that role to a tee."

After those full songs were eliminated, it was time to focus on what could be removed internally from the tunes present. A 40-second verse from "Mama, I'm a Big Girl Now" went early on. The second verse of "It Takes Two," a song for heartthrob crooner Link, was swiftly clipped, so Vegas audiences will not be treated to the "A king ain't a king/Without the pow'r behind the throne" segment of that ditty. "I basically looked over the songs and figured out little ways to cut, maybe boosting a tempo here or there, in ways that are almost imperceptible, but by the end of the song, you've cut out 20 seconds or more," Shaiman said. "We just kept adding up all the little 20 seconds."

After Shaiman discussed the changes with co-lyricist and partner Scott Wittman, the pair sent their notes off to O'Donnell and Meehan.

SHAVING THE SCENES
"We've been very lucky as a team that we are usually concordant about what needs to be done for our beautiful baby," O'Donnell gushed. "Everyone made their little Sophie's Choice sacrifices. Marc fired off the first salvo, he began with a long memo saying ‘We could do this, this and this.' We pretty much agreed with his notes, and then it was our turn."

"Tom and I spent a couple of days doing a triage on the material—like which lines must be there and what can we get along without. Some long speeches we compressed into a simpler thought; monologues became one-liners that delivered the same moral," O'Donnell added. Almost every scene has been trimmed for the Luxor.

Of course the changes have not all involved removal. For instance, the cutting of the jailhouse scene necessitated some new lines be added. In the original version, all of the participants in the television station scuffle end up in the slammer; in Vegas, only the central character of Tracy Turnblad gets arrested. To convey that, during the ruckus Velma now says to the police, while motioning to Tracy, "It's all her fault! Take her away!" "We're going more with the idea that she is Mahatma Gandhi," O'Donnell relayed. "They arrest the ringleader." After that scene is over, there is another addition just to make sure the audience knows that Tracy is indeed in jail, as they have not seen her in her cell. During the phone call mother Edna has with Mr. Pinky the store owner who calls to rescind Tracy's sponsorship deal after he reads about her trouble-making, Edna now says to him: "I don't know why they had to put her in solitary confinement." While the phone call happens in both versions, that particular line is absent in the original script.

Another noticeable book change is that the competition to win Miss Teenage Hairspray is no longer a dance-off. Instead the contest is simply based on popularity, thus enabling the song "Cooties" which was part of the dance competition to be easily cut.

O'Donnell and Meehan took their revised script, with the incorporated song cuts and notes about the changes they made, and sent it off to Shaiman, Wittman, director Jack O'Brien, choreographer Jerry Mitchell, Broadway producer Margo Lion and star Harvey Fierstein who is also a playwright and librettist. Once all comments had been considered by the score and book teams, it was time to see if Hairspray still had all its bounce.

CAN YOU STOP THE BEAT?
O'Brien and Mitchell had the responsibility of making sure everything in the new script was capable of being accomplished, insuring quick changes could be covered and various other such things. Upon completion of that task, the new Hairspray was ready for its premiere. Shortly before summer began, many on the tuner's team got together to read the piece in an attempt to gauge running time and effectiveness. The reading featured O'Brien as Edna, O'Donnell as Wilbur and current Broadway leads Shannon Durig and Andrew Rannells as Tracy and Link, respectively. "I'm no Harvey," O'Brien joked, "but I think I acquitted myself with some degree of dignity and dexterity, as well as keeping the ball in the air. [However] I have no delusions about ever repeating the exercise, I assure you and Harvey!"

Despite the absence of original stars Fierstein and Dick Latessa who will both be opening the show in Vegas, the reading went very well by all accounts. It came out at 83 minutes, which leaves enough time in the 90-minute span for applause and laughs. "At the end of it, [Shannon and Andrew] gave us the nicest compliment, which was, ‘I couldn't tell what you cut,'" O'Donnell remarked. "That was our goal."

WELCOME TO THE STRIP
Rehearsals for the Vegas production of Hairspray do not begin until the end of December, but the creative team is already excited. "One rarely gets the opportunity to take a different slant and approach to a work like Hairspray," O'Brien said. "We're confident that we've done a bang-up job. Those who have never seen the work will not have a clue what is missing, and those who love it as we do, will revel in the new perspective."

Nevertheless, there are a few lingering concerns. O'Donnell notes that the pace is now truly "supersonic" and Shaiman is a tiny bit worried about people sitting through the piece in one chunk. "It was easier to cut down the show than for me to imagine people sitting through the entire story without a break," Shaiman said. "There are no ‘OK, here is the time where we can catch our breath' moments. It's going to be like a roller coaster for the cast and the audience. Time will tell whether it will work."

The creative team will be on hand during rehearsals and previews to attempt remedy any issues that arise. The show will officially open at the Luxor Theater, where it is scheduled to play 10 performances a week, on February 17. "The people in Vegas don't want to sit there," Shaiman stated. "They want to be back out there in the casinos, they don't want their entertainment to be two and a half hours long. I say find out what they want and how they want it and let them have it just that way. We do know the audiences will still leave with a big, full evening of Hairspray."

Hairspray starts February 6, 2006 at the Luxor Theater of the Luxor Las Vegas.