The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built by Jack Viertel Page B

smash. But in the midst of transmuting Broadway’s Golden Age to Disney animation, Howard Ashman died—one of the thousands of artists lost to the AIDS epidemic. He was forty.
    Disney completed the film he was working on at the time of his death, the charming Aladdin. And Alan Menken remained the studio’s most successful composer, writing several fine scores with other collaborators. But the Ashman-Menken touch really existed for only two and a half movies. With the exception of The Lion King , about which more later, and Frozen , currently on its way to Broadway, the studio hasn’t reached those artistic heights in animation again.
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    A direct line can be drawn between Little Shop in 1982 and Hairspray , which opened almost exactly twenty years later, in 2002. They share a tone and a point of view, they’re both based on camp cult movies, and they both have a lot more on their minds than their loopy styles would suggest. They also use their opening numbers in almost identical ways, and like a number of classic shows, they use their I Want (which is incorporated into the opening number) to do something diabolically subversive. Unlike the simpler if no less passionate desires that inform shows like A Chorus Line and Gypsy , the desire that drives these shows seems sufficient at the time but leads to a surprise. There is a deeper, greater desire hidden behind the first one, which allows the show’s real subject to expand exponentially at the halfway mark without interrupting the antic spirit that grabs the audience in the first place. If you consider the initial desire as a hill to be climbed, the experience of these shows is like discovering that there’s a hill behind the hill—and a more interesting hike in store than you might have imagined.
    Tracy Turnblad, the heroine of Hairspray , has a simple desire, but one that’s difficult for her to achieve: she wants to dance on the local Baltimore equivalent of American Bandstand , the ubiquitous TV show that featured “regular” teenagers dancing to the latest hit-parade rock-and-roll records in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Tracy has a problem, though: she’s fat. The term “regular,” in that day (and this), didn’t include the latitude of having a fat girl on TV, especially not on a dance show. So Tracy has to fight for what she wants, and even though it seems like a trivial desire in one sense, in another, it’s a fight for equality, for acceptance, for recognition that we may be created equal, but we may not look that way.
    In Hairspray ’s I Want moment, Tracy pleads for a chance to dance and makes it clear that her identity is defined—for her—by the fact that in those moments when she’s moving to the beat, she’s “a movie star.” Of course, no one will let her onto The Corny Collins Show , Hairspray ’s version of American Bandstand. Yet, halfway through the show’s first act, she accomplishes her desire—she wins a place on the TV show. And Hairspray should be over right then. This is where the “hill behind the hill” starts to function. For in joining the cast of The Corny Collins Show , Tracy discovers that she’s not the only one with a history of oppression. Once a month, the show features “Negro Day,” when the black kids get to dance. But never with white kids, and only on that one day. Struck by the idea that this injustice has no appropriate place in American life, Tracy is transformed from a girl with a problem to a crusader for everyone’s problems, and her need to dance is replaced by her much greater need to integrate television—and the world.
    There’s something thrilling about seeing a cloistered young person’s consciousness raised in a way that redefines her life and her mission, and, even within the somewhat goofy confines of a show like Hairspray or Little Shop , it’s moving—it turns a protagonist into a hero. It’s what Camelot was trying to do, in fact. Seymour makes his bargain with