The Hairspray remake completely underwhelmed me. The only bright spot was Penny Pingleton's mother; reviews have tended to like Penny Pingleton and said she stole every scene she was in, but I think her mother was the one who really did that. She captured the serious camp-vibe of the original, which the movie failed to do. The great part about the original Hairspray was not only that it revived all these now-campy dances and songs that were actual dances and songs from the early 1960s, but also that it showed the seriousness which teens and people took these extremely local shows before the advent of cross-country teen danceshows like American Bandstand. Since the Hairspray remake substitued shitty Broadway songs for the former and stuck in shittier songs for the latter, which was straight-up acting mixed in with straight-up dialogue in the original, it had no hopes of recreating the vibe of the original and was the worse-off for that.
As a friend was telling me, all Broadway shows about popular music fail on some level since their music is never as good as the popular music of the time, which shows in how no Broadway music ever crossed over on a big way into the contemporary pop charts. The one exception to that, though, I was thinking, might be three (four? three-and-a-half?) songs from Hair -- the Cowsill's "Hair", Three Dog Night's "Easy to Be Hard", Oliver's "Good Morning Starshine", and the Fifth Dimension's "Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In".
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Mmmmhmmm, "Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" is truly great.
I remember Barry Manilow's cover of that Cats song, but I think it only hit #20 or so. And even Madonna's movie from the Evita film only made like #10 or so.
I wonder where "Age of Aquarius"Let the Sunshine In" made it on the charts. I tried that at karaoke once, back when I was young. The lovely and gracious karaoke hostess at the time, who I love very dearly, said that she was glad that I had the balls to sing the song, since she had thought about it a lot but didn't.
Once, though, she did sing "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina", and did a fantastic job. Me and my friend who were there wanted to cry (honestly).
It was #1 for something like five weeks. I imagine that's the all time record for something from Broadway? How do you do "Let the Sunshine In" on karaoke?
You don't, that's why the lovely and gracious karaoke hostess never attempted the song.
I think Diana Ross did that song and used to walk around the audience and have people from the audience sing a line of it into the microphone she held out, if I remember correctly.
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