Lakeland College's Musical, Hairspray !

On April 7th, 2016, I attended Lakeland College's musical, "Hairspray!” Overall I thought it was a great performance. It was my first time seeing this musical in particular. There were many things that made the performance spectacular including: the outfits, the setting, and the actors singing voices. There were also a few things that made the play worse than it could have been and it was mostly the technical difficulties.
In the beginning of the play all of the lights were out and the spotlight was on the main character, Tracy Turnblad. It was very effective to make sure that all eyes were on her for the opening scene. I liked how they set the stage up where on the far right of the stage was at first a bed that Tracy was in and then they turned
The musical is from the 60's so in detention it was most always Tracy and then the rest of the kids were all black portraying the ghetto life. It gave all the black kids the label that they are all trouble makers and not smart and they were put in the "special ed" class. There was a lot of racism going on in the play especially when Motormouth and her children and the rest of the black community came out. The cast of the "Corny Collins Show" where all white people who are scared of the blacks and didn't want to join in on dancing with the rest of the blacks like Tracy did. So Tracy and her parents came out and held picket signs with the blacks some of which that said "Integration not Segregation", and "Do the Checkerboard". Tracy's family also came in and her dad wanted chicken and waffles which is a meal that is from African Americans. The play incorporated how segregation was back in the
Tracy's mom, Edna Turnblad, didn't know her lines at a few parts where he stop in the middle of the sentence. I'm not sure if she finished with improv lines or it just took a little bit to remember the lines. Another part of the play when they were singing "Big Girl" there was a part when someone forgot to speak their lines, the music kept playing, the spot light wasn't on and Tracy, who is played by Tia was looking around like 'what the heck'. Also, the second time they did roll call something went wrong where they were just standing in a line in the middle of the stage and they were waiting for something and I could hear someone in the mic whisper "what are we waiting for?” A few other times when Tracy was singing solo there was background noise from the other mics still being on. At one part the lighting was a little of because half the stage was lit and Tracy didn't have any lights on her while she was singing. The lights were on other people who weren't moving or singing at the time. Without these small difficulties I think the play would have had a bigger rating from