HAIRSPRAY LIVE! Viewing Thread — Page 17

this sums up my reaction towards the show as a whole:

neonlightsxo said: "newintown said: "Maybe he wasn't solely responsible for earlier success?"

Seriously. The success of Grease was the combination of Tommy Kail and Alex Rudzinski. When you remove Tommy Kail...you get what we saw last night."

i was referring to the technical direction of Grease being far superior to Hairspray, and i was under the impression Alex did both technical directions and Tommy had solely directed Grease dramatically (that's what was implied by many earlier this year when some were congratulating Kail on the technical direction)

Wow, So the claim that the camera cut away from Kristin's Bow because her strap broke is true?? How'd they fix it soo fast, cause she was dancing along with the rest of the cast a few shots later.

Did anyone else experience a technical glitch right after Miss Baltimore Crabs? Our screen blacked out for like 30 seconds.

All in all, we really enjoyed the broadcast. It's great that Harvey Fierstein's performance has been preserved. Every time K-Chen hit one of those ridiculously high notes, I was like- "Of course they had to put that in."

Ephraim Sykes was an amazing dancer, and of course J-Hud was wonderful in "I Know Where I've Been."

Andrea Martin and Sean Hayes's cameos were so cute.

As an aside, I don't think The Wiz Live! was nearly as bad as people are saying here. The cast was great- in fact, I thought Ne-Yo was the biggest surprise with his performance. To me, that alone would make it worth seeing at least once. I'm finally going to watch Grease Live! this month. Way behind, I know.

Lets agree to disagree but my opinion was sound of music was the best one to date. From there things started going downhill and for me its not what I expected these broadcasts to be. I cheered when I read that they were doing Hairspray, because in two years we were finally getting another well loved title but how disappointed this left me. I don't know maybe because it failed technically but I feel that this just failed. The opening number which is one of my favorite made me wanna tune out.

I said this last year and will say it again. Talent should not be showcased on these broadcasts. Shanice Williams was great but sorry to say this Tracey failed.

I don't know if this was mentioned, but some of the facts on the Facebook live backstage stream were totally wrong. My favorite being: "Andrea Martin, who plays Penny's mother, has won six Tony Awards!"

Did they think she was Audra McDonald by accident?

New York Times review by Neil Genzlinger gets it right:

All in all, it wasn’t an unpleasant revisiting of a great musical; it just wasn’t a particularly coherent or revelatory one. Now someone just needs to mount a Broadway revival and cast Ms. Hudson in it.

The press makes a big deal out of the ratings while the network doesn't because when "The Sound Of Music" was broadcast, it was billed as a one night only live event. Then it was repeated, then the DVD was issued. Now audiences know fully well that there are options. The network knows a certain amount will watch it live, while more will DVR it, On Demand it, and buy the DVD. At the end of the day, all that is added in.

CarlosAlberto, well...

Watching this right now on the website but WTF why was Good Morning Baltimore taking place in the evening? And why didn't anyone work with Ariana on her acting? So atrocious

The problem with these broadcasts is that on the night they are live, negative comments which are very influential and affecting one's views are bombarding social media. Frankly, I cannot understand how someone can judge a performance by toying with their device and the show is going on. But for that night it is becoming much more interesting to read/type tweets than watching the actual show.

Fortunately and unfortunately once these are released on DVD they are much more enjoyable to watch than the evening of the live broadcast. Fortunately because its a nice thing for fans to own these shows and are able to watch whenever they like. Negative side is because future shows relies on the ratings they bring in and once we see a decline in ratings, we would definitely be seeing an end to this tradition, which was just taking off.

Hairspray is a very entertaining and enjoyable piece, however I do feel that NBC failed last Wednesday. Mainly because of technical problems and I do hope that these will be fixed for the official release as well the re-broadcast which is scheduled for December 26th. But I do agree that another reason this failed was because they tried hard to make it look like Grease as they possible could. The network should have kept its own style and not try to imitate and hire people that worked for FOX to make it identical. From interviews one could tell that this was their goal and my perspective is what made Hairspray fail.

From what we have seen I question Fox's success. No doubt that the majority who enjoys commenting on these chat boards loved it, but a good question what did the majority of the other viewers think? For the same network's Rocky Horror Picture Show there was a dramatic decline in ratings and another for NBC's Hairspray. As much as I enjoyed Grease, there were a lot of things that annoyed me, notably the interviews which NBC decided to adopt between scenes.

I enjoyed the first three broadcasts very much, and hate to see this thing coming to an end before it even started as there are lot of shows I would love to see.

I own all the live shows on DVD and The Sound of Music, Peter Pan, The Wiz had edits to remove faults. That being said I am toying about Hairspray, since personally I did not like it that much. Will it be same performance and will it be edited for the DVD release.

I wish these broadcasts were not filmed live.