Opening Night: HAIRSPRAY

• Director: John Waters
• Cast: Divine, Ruth Brown, Ricki Lake, Debbie Harry 
• 1988 | Film: 92mins | USA | Subtitles | Event: 20:45 – 23:10 [18+]

It’s Baltimore, 1962, and teenager Tracy Turnblad dreams of appearing on the local TV dance show, but will barriers to integration get in her way?

“A COMEDY BY JOHN WATERS.”

Cult film night BAR TRASH continues with CELLULOID JAM, an unofficial celebration of 50 years of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975).

You can’t go to ROCKY HORROR without dancing the Time Warp, the cult rock musical’s homage to the 1950s/60s dance fads that packed dance floors across America with horny, time-stepping teenagers. Novelty dances like The Madison, Watusi, and Mashed Potato often rose up from African-American dance halls to spread like wildfire through radio, TV and the movies. Teen-pics were big box office, from the juvenile delinquent melodramas of the 1950s to the hedonistic beach-blanket party flicks of the 1960s.

John Waters’ 1988 musical comedy HAIRSPRAY is a vibrant cocktail of all these social and cinematic conventions, blending them together to tell the winning story of a fat white girl’s encounter with racial segregation and the African-American Civil Rights movement.

“The truly radical sub-text… is that a heroine can be politically motivated, a good dancer, attractive to the opposite sex, and fat all at the same time.”

Anne Bilson, Sight & Sound

HAIRSPRAY was also drag megastar Divine’s final film in which he quite literally cross-dresses as both Tracy’s hyper-stressed Mom, Edna Turnblad, and a white male racist, Arvin Hodgepile (Waters has a great way naming villains!). Divine died three weeks after the film’s lukewarm release and so didn’t see HAIRSPRAY become a cult home video smash that was given a musical makeover for Broadway and the West End. It’s the perfect dance party to open our ROCKY HORROR season.

Polite notice: We are projecting HAIRSPRAY with subtitles from the best available digital source.

// Part of BAR TRASH: CELLULOID JAM, a fan-powered celebration of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. Hosted by queer film fanatic Token Homo (creator of BAR TRASH and QUEER HORROR NIGHTS), all films screen with an introduction, intermission, and subtitles/captions (where possible!). Tickets from £3.50. Adults 18+ only. Follow @tokenhomo on Instagram for news and updates. //