Analysis Of The Film Hairspray

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Recommended: Music and narrative in film

There are different ideas and themes covered in musical performances in this modern society, for example war and love in Miss Saigon, feminism in Mamma Mia! and racial issues in Porgy and Bess. In the musical film Hairspray, there are more interesting ideas in the plot so I would like to discuss the musical further in this piece of work. Hairspray was an American musical film in 2007, it was a adaptation from a musical and comedy in 2002 and 1988 respectively. There were several changes in the 2007 film, for example some characters in the older versions did not appear in the 2007 version, and some songs changed order for the plot. The new version of this musical received a lot of positive reviews from public, in a review from BBC Movies the rating of the film was quite high. For instance, the reviewer gave full marks for the musical and the user of the website gave 4.5 marks in average out of 5 (Papamichael, 2007). The general idea of this musical film was about a fat girl chase for her dream in the American society in the 1960s, there were racial issues in the plot as well. In this piece of work, comparison between stage and film version, features of the musical performance from different scenes in the film will be illustrated and I will talk about the theme and symbols in this movie as well.

Although this piece of work will mainly focus in the movie version, there is a discussion about the similarities and differences between stage and movie version, I have chosen the 2011 stage version to investigate in it. Firstly about the similarities, the story plots in both stage and movie versions were mostly the same in the first act and there were not many differences on the cast as well. However, there were also differences between b...

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...attracted more audiences. There were different features in this musical like stereotype on teenagers and racial issues, they appeared in some of the scenes and they were important to the story plot. The other big feature in the production was the tradition of cast in Edna Turnblad’s role, every production of this musical used actor to take the role instead of actress. It became one of the reasons that made audience went to cinemas to watch this film and this role received quite a number of positive comments. There were also symbols in the production as well, they signified different meanings towards to plot and the character traits for example fame and the growth. Finally the themes were positive in the musical and made the audience learn from most of the characters, the settings were also good and it was a good piece of production either in stage and film version.

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