Hairspray

NEW YORK -- No doubt John Waters meant it fondly when he quipped: "Come to Baltimore and be appalled." Now his vision of 1960s Baltimore is headed to Broadway, where, with the help of a team of designers, the musical theater version of Waters' 1988 movie Hairspray will show Charm City in all its delightfully excessive glory -- complete with big hair, fake Formstone and fabrics with more florals than a florist's shop. What will Baltimore look like on Broadway? Right now, only Tony Award-winning costume designer William Ivey Long, set designer David Rockwell and -- most crucial for a show called Hairspray -- Paul Huntley, Broadway's top wig designer, know for sure.

Wanted: Overweight girl with a pretty face, infectious grin and indomitable spirit. Must be a "triple threat" talent - singer/dancer/actress with a powerful Broadway-caliber singing voice. Wait, we know this girl! She's Tracy Turnblad, and a nationwide casting search is under way for an actress to play her in another movie version of Hairspray. The role is one of three principal parts that will be cast in open auditions starting next week, producers announced yesterday. One thing, though.

Tracy Turnblad will dance again. Baltimore's scribe of the salacious, John Waters, confirmed yesterday that he has been asked to start work on a sequel to Hairspray, his story of big hair and integrated dance halls that became the surprise movie musical hit of 2007. "I am just beginning to think about it," said Waters, adding he signed the deal with New Line Cinema, a Warner Bros. subsidiary, within the past two weeks. "I'm just figuring out what it is." Waters, who doesn't like to talk about any of his projects in advance, suspects most of the characters from the original Hairspray will return.

Hairspray put the final rhinestones in its tiara last night when it swept the 57th annual Tony Awards with eight of the little silver trophies, including the top prize, for Best Musical. A radiant Margo Lion, the show's Baltimore-born producer, shepherded choreographer Jerry Mitchell, filmmaker John Waters, a score of co-producers, the entire creative team and some of the cast onstage before accepting her trophy. "That's how many people it takes, and more, to make a musical. I'm not interested in standing up there by myself," she explained later.

NEW YORK - Divine would be so proud. There, inside the fashion mecca that is Bloomingdale's; there, inside an exclusive designer boutique, a black T-shirt screams the name of the late, great transvestite legend in lipstick-pink letters. And it's selling like mad. Irony piles on irony when one considers the shop devoted to all things Hairspray. Bad taste suddenly has become good taste, and Divine, a fashion plate. Who knew? Kal Ruttenstein, for one. The senior vice president of fashion merchandising says the retail giant has had great success with tie-ins to Broadway plays and movies, such as Rent.

Hold on to your pettipants: the world of Formstone and John Waters, of big hair and the Har-De-Har Hut, has invaded Tokyo and Johannesburg. And the stunned inhabitants may never be the same. "It was pretty fascinating doing the show in Japan, because the language barrier and the culture barrier was huge," says Jerry O'Boyle, who portrayed the role of Edna Turnblad in the Far East. He will play the same plus-sized matron when the national tour stops at Baltimore's Hippodrome Theatre this week.

When Hairspray launches its national tour at the Mechanic Theatre on Tuesday, one cast member will be making his professional debut in his former home state. And no one is more surprised than that actor himself - Bryan West. A 1995 graduate of the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he majored in voice, West, 26, fully expected to spend his career as a musician. The series of events that led him to Hairspray began two weeks into his freshman year at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn.

Baltimore's been the hottest ticket on Broadway for four months now. And on Thursday, Mayor Martin O'Malley and his family joined the throngs of true believers when they made a pilgrimage to New York and took in a performance of Hairspray. "We had a blast," the mayor said yesterday morning. "The last time I was up here milking off of somebody's talents was for the Super Bowl victory, so I suppose this is, in theater, potentially what the Super Bowl was for us in sports." O'Malley said he thinks the musical - based on John Waters' 1988 movie, which takes place in 1960s Baltimore - "can do great things for Baltimore.

The late Buddy Deane, godfather of Baltimore's television teendom, would have loved it: A group of his "kids," those achingly popular high schoolers who danced the cha-cha and Mashed Potato to fame 45 years ago, savoring the Broadway musical inspired by his television dance show. At least 10 "Deaners" - regulars on the Buddy Deane Show, a live dance program that captivated filmmaker John Waters and helped define the late '50s, early '60s in Baltimore - were at the Mechanic last night to welcome the award-winning Broadway show to its rightful home.

NEW YORK - If Margo Lion hadn't come down with a head cold three years ago, none of this would have happened. She was in bed, nursing the sniffles and watching videos, when it hit her: Hairspray, the 1988 movie by counterculture filmmaker John Waters, has all the makings of a classic American musical. It was a revelation, she admits. The Tony Award-winning Broadway producer and Baltimore native hadn't been a huge fan of the Waters film when it came out. Waters' only movie to earn a PG rating (much to his shock and dismay)