On television, NBC is about to premiere a show called American Dreams. It's about a perky teenage girl in Philadelphia in 1963 and her desperate desire to become a dancer on the live local show American Bandstand. More generally it's about the tumult and liberation of "the Sixties" - rock-and-roll, sexual freedom, the breakdown of authority, civil rights, and so on -- as experienced by her middle-class, shopkeeper family. And it's full of period music.

Meanwhile, on Broadway, a musical comedy opened a couple of nights ago. It's called Hairspray, and it's about a perky teenage girl in 1963 and her desperate desire to become a dancer on the Baltimore version of American Bandstand. It's about the tumult and liberation of "the Sixties" - rock-and-roll, sexual freedom, the breakdown of authority, civil rights, and
so on -- as experienced by her middle-class, shopkeeper family. And it's full of period music.

What struck me, seeing one right after the other, is how different the two shows are. American Dreams, the ostensibly realistic, entirely earnest TV series, seems like a horribly sentimental cartoon, generic and/or false at almost every moment.

Hairspray, on the other hand, is based faithfully on a campy, absurd movie comedy by John Waters, the king of campy, absurd and sometimes insanely vulgar movie comedies. The film starred Ricki Lake, and the transvestite actor Divine. And now it has been translated to live musical theater -- which as a genre is inherently campy and absurd.

The mother in the new Broadway musical is played by Harvey Fierstein -- the very large, very gay male performer. At one point, when half the cast is getting bailed out of jail, the bailiff says to the sprung prisoners, "OK, everybody, leave your tap shoes on the way out."

Yet miraculously, Hairspray the musical is not just smart, fun, and funny, it has moments that are actually moving and even inspiring. It tells its story about civil rights and tolerance - Tracy the fat girl leads a crusade to integrate the TV dance show - in a way that finally seems serious, although never solemn or preachy. Whereas in the new TV show American Dreams the artifacts of early-60s nostalgia are pretty much the whole point.

So it's the realistic tale that affects the greatest sincerity -- the first episode ends with JFK's assassination -- that in fact seems most cynical and empty. And it's the highly stylized, deeply irreverent comedy - Hairspray -- that seems profoundly more sincere and consequential.

As it happens, I know people involved in both shows. I do a little work with Studios USA, which produced American Dreams. And a couple of my friends are key members of the Hairspray team. Mark O'Donnell co-wrote the "book" for the musical.

[Clip: Mark O' Donnell] "We were walking a tightrope between tastelessness, insincerity, camp, gross-out. And on the other hand smarmy, sentimental over-simplification. In the movie she gets what she wants right away, she gets on the show right away, she gets the guy, that's funny and fizzy with a great fast cut. But in the theater, when you're watching people, you have to have some human relationship with them

David Rockwell, the set designer, on John Waters' reaction to the out-of-town tryouts earlier this summer.

[Clip: David Rockwell] "John called after the first time he saw it in Seattle, and he said, 'I hate everything and I loved it.' So I think that he's struck by how it really brings his story to life."

[Clip: Mark O' Donnell] "There were a couple times when he cautioned us against Hallmark sentimentality. But he loved the real emotion. And conversely, a few times we had Tracy getting gruff and even offensive, and he said, 'she's a good girl.' So he too was watching the balance."

The balance, in other words, between "reality" and a kind of arch cartooniness.

Harvey Fierstein does not turn Edna, the mother, into a one-note camp joke. In fact, the big-gay-guy-in-drag implicitly extends the pro-tolerance moral of this pre-gay-liberation story to homosexuals.

[Clip: David Rockwell] "When the first audience came in, everyone realized people are in love with Edna, Tracy and Wilbur and kind of root for them. And that there was a heart to the show that seemed to anchor it through all of that."

[Clip: Mark O' Donnell] "We didn't expect we'd get the emotional payoff because Harvey plays it realistically, and you get a strong sense of family from it. I thought it might be the Addams family. But we get something more like You Can't Take It With You."

You Can't Take It With You. Exactly: the Kaufman and Hart play and the Frank Capra movie about eccentrics were produced at the very moment and out of the very show business culture that spawned modern musical comedy -- back before so much of theater and film was pinched into a choice between authentic feeling and sentiment or wisecracking and smart irony. Back when a show could do both well.

As a result, I'm convinced, Hairspray will be a staggering commercial success. And if NBC hasn't cancelled the tediously earnest, nostalgia-fest of American Dreams by spring, I'll be surprised.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360

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