You Can't Stop The Beat!

The Truth Behind the Musical Hairspray. 

Hairspray, the hit West-End and Broadway musical entertains thousands across the globe, having won eight Tony Awards, including best musical. With its upbeat music and a strong moral story about a teenage girl, Tracy Turnblad who with her friends, Link Larkin, Penny Pingleton and Seaweed J. Stubbs, fight to integrate the local hit tv teenage dance show ‘The Corny Collins Show’. Tracy earns her place on the show after impressing Corny with dance moves she learned from Seaweed but is dismayed that her ‘negro’ friends aren’t allowed to dance with her on the show. Tracy and her friends hatch a plan to interrupt the show and force it to become integrated. The musical ends with Tracy boldly declaring that “The Corny Collins Show is… now and forevermore...officially integrated!” before all the cast join together in a finale song with lyrics mentioning shaking the world up and changing history, with the character Motormouth Maybelle, singing,

‘yesterday is history...and it’s never coming back. ‘Cause tomorrow is a brand new day… and it don’t know white from black’.  

However, in reality, the outcome for the tv show in which the musical was based was very different. The Buddy Deane Show the inspiration for the musical, aired on Baltimore network WJZ-TV, from 1954 until it's abrupt cancellation in January 1964. The show was an instant hit from its debut, thousands of Baltimore’s teenagers would tune in six days a week, to dance alongside the shows Committee of ‘the nicest kids in town!’ Just like ‘The Corny Collins Show’, The Buddy Deane Show was segregated, holding monthly ‘Negro Days’ in which local black kids from various church groups or Boys or Girls clubs were invited to dance on the show. Despite members of the network and teenagers on the committee wanting to integrate the show more, network executives decided to continue to keep the show segregated like was common practice in everyday Baltimore. 

On August 12, 1963 black and white dancers stormed the stage in an attempt to forcefully integrate the show. The show was broadcast live and therefore had to continue despite the sudden forced integration. After that day the network and show received numerous threats which ultimately led to the cancellation of the show, fearing that it would stir up white supermancey.

Throughout the shows running, it did face some opposition, some segregationists felt that the show was trying to force black culture on the youth, and would often hand out flyers warning parents of ‘race music’ and telling them to stop their children watching the show. In fairness, much of the music and dance moves were taken from black dance halls and re-created on the show by the all-white committee.

Although, the musical  ‘Hairspray’ does not quite match the reality, it does give audiences the chance to see the social issues that faced 1960’s Baltimore with the added bonus of its catchy upbeat musical numbers. The musical highlights the changing attitudes at the time towards integration and allows the audience the chance to feel like they are apart of that struggle.

By Charlii Ashenden