It had some outstanding moments - ranging from Hudson and Chenoweth's singing, to almost every second of every major dance number. NBC's 'Hairspray Live' was a nice holiday gift for Baltimore. The technology of the medium and separation created by the screen make it a flatter, colder, more distanced experience. TV does a lot of fabulous things, but that's one thing it simply cannot do - give you that same tactile, physical, visceral connection to the stage. You'll never feel the floor shake and throb with the pounding of the dancers' feet onstage when you are sitting in front of a TV screen. The energy, the transcendence that you experience in a theater during a great moment in a musical cannot be communicated through a TV screen. It is one of the most inspirational and exalted acts human beings are capable of.Īnd this I know: Musicals are almost impossible to translate to TV.

Look, even though I have devoted much of my professional life to writing about TV and love the medium, I worship musical theater. Here, that semi-overhead shot only distracted and broke the spell. But this is not a film, and it totally jarred me out of the reverie of their song and reminded me of the artifice of 13 cameras and a director trying to make use of all of them, whether they add anything or not.

Watch hairspray live