Hairspray – Good evening Balti-fast! (Grand Opera House until Saturday 31 August)

While the starting point of the stage musical Hairspray is a TV producer rejecting the audition of a white girl with plus-sized proportions to be on the popular Corny Collins dance show, the conflict is quickly established as the racist segregation that sees an all-white cast broadcast every week except ‘Negro Day’. But young Tracy Turnblad gets a second chance when the show’s host comperes her school dance and is impressed with the fresh moves she’s picked up from black students in her regular detention class.

It may be her professional debut, but Alexandra Emmerson-Kirby gets straight down to business making a strong impression with Tracy’s opening number Good Morning Baltimore, soon followed up with the demanding but well-delivered I Can Hear The Bells. The early appearance of remote-control rats suggests that the next couple of hours will be very playful. Mama, I’m a Big Girl Now creates a pacey triptych between Tracy, her best friend Penny, and TV dancer Amber and their respective mothers.

Tracy’s mum and dad – played by Neil Hurst (traditionally a drag role) and Dermot Canavan – mercilessly milk Timeless to Me to the delight of the audience and themselves. Katlo injects a lot of energy to the production every time Little Inez comes to the front of the stage. The second act quartet Without Love shows off Freya McMahon’s superb voice (playing Penny) alongside Reece Richards (Seaweed), Solomon Davy (Link) and Emmerson-Kirby (Tracy).

Embellishments to the 2021/22 tour add unfussy projected backdrops for a handful of scenes and see Brenda Edwards (formerly Motormouth Maybelle) join Paul Kerryson as co-director. Some neat moments of choreography – there’s a Bucks Fizz skirt pull – are lost in the melee and wasted. At Monday evening’s performance, Motormouth was played by Vanessa Dumatey who had stacks of stage presence and a great singing voice, but lacked some of the vocal grittiness usually associated with the role.

The contemporary resonance of the long-standing line “manipulating the judicial system just to win a contest is un-American” was appreciated by the Grand Opera House audience, even if the Milton joke passed most by.

Three weeks ago, PSNI landrovers with their sirens blazing raced past the door of the theatre as audiences left the opening night of The Simon & Garfunkel Story to respond to race-motivated violence just a couple of hundred yards away. Disappointingly, the climatic moment in the dialogue – where Tracy declares that “The Corny Collins Show is now and forevermore officially integrated” – barely got a whimper from the Belfast audience never mind the whoop it might stir up in some other UK venues. I can’t help wondering if the local audiences will be the most predominantly white ones that the Hairspray cast perform to on their UK tour. That’s not a fault of anyone attending, but the fact that local theatre audiences rarely reflect the full diversity of those living and working in Northern Ireland should be a matter of concern and on the agenda of the Arts Council.

Hairspray is a story of its time with dialogue from the 1960s – or perhaps the 1980s when the original film was released – that now jar. Aspects of the musical’s original book that tend towards a white saviour narrative (teen Tracy being celebrated for her role in integrating Baltimore) have been watered down with Inez winning the Miss Hairspray competition instead of Tracy. This prevents the eleven o’clock number I Know Where I’ve Been from being robbed of its power.

Hairspray continues its run at the Grand Opera House until Saturday 31 August. Even a delayed start and some misbehaving scenery in the second act couldn’t stop the beat this evening. And if you miss out on tickets, the cast will be back in Derry’s Millennium Forum next March (Monday 10–Saturday 15).

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