#Watch hairspray live 2016 movie

Though Hairspray Live! was three hours long and aired on a school night, it was clearly meant as a family affair. The crushing popularity of DVRs and streaming services over the last decade and a half means moments like these are few and far between, yet they still feel familiar. It also anchors the 2016 show in a storied tradition of appointment television revolving around musical acts and a shared reverence of popular culture. That setting makes it ideal for the broadcast musical format - the live studio audience might as well be extras, as they pull double duty as Hairspray’s crowd and Collins’ screaming teen fans. The beloved musical is set in 1962 Baltimore, and orbits around the American Bandstand-inspired daytime TV program The Corny Collins Show.

#Watch hairspray live 2016 movie

(Explain to me why I don’t get to see a movie musical every summer?) That film adaptation, directed by A Walk to Remember’s Adam Shankman, raked in over $200 million in the same month as Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and the original Transformers. This production was based on the 2002 Broadway musical, which is based on the 1988 John Waters film ( the definition of a cult classic), but Hairspray was most recently experienced by a broad audience in the summer of 2007 as Zac Efron’s post- High School Musical star vehicle. The nonsensical but utterly magical trend of major broadcast networks producing expensive and messy live musicals continued last night with NBC’s production of Hairspray.