
Hairspray
A Screenplay
Author: John Waters
Narrator: John Waters
Unabridged: 2 hr 5 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Published: 10/21/2025
Categories: Nonfiction, Performing Arts, Comedy, Dance, Screenplays
Synopsis
Tracy Turnblad, a spunky, full-figured Baltimore teen, wants nothing more than to be a featured dancer on The Corny Collins Show. So when she gets chosen to be on the air, it seems like all her dreams are about to come true. But when she and some of the Black cast of the show try to integrate the segregated dancing, things take on a life of their own. A sweet, hopeful parable about the dangers of conformity and segregation, Hairspray is perhaps the one optimistic entry in John Waters’s shocking and delightfully deranged oeuvre. Both a clear-eyed social critique and a celebration of the dizzying aesthetics of Baltimore in the early 1960s, this is another, softer side to the essential John Waters.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux