I did an interview with John Waters last week that’s running in the Nov. 8 issue of the New Haven Advocate, in advance of the esteemed director coming to New London with his one-man show This Filthy World. Waters’ appearance is a benefit for the local AIDS/HIV support organization Alliance for Living.
While I had him on the phone, I asked the esteem bad-taste aesthete if he had any memories to share about Mark O’Donnell, who wrote (with Thomas Meehan) the book for the Broadway musical Hairspray based on Waters’ 1988 film original. O’Donnell died suddenly this past August after collapsing in his New York apartment.
Waters remembers O’Donnell fondly. “He didn’t let things throw him” is one of his many friendly observations about the man.
I had gotten to know O’Donnell a little myself over the years. I first met him when he gave a reading at Yale one summer in the mid-‘90s, but I had first encountered his work some 20 years earlier when he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. (I was a suburban high schooler at the time, and would but the Lampoon at the newsstands in Cambridge.) He later contributed to Spy Magazine and the New Yorker, and though he professed that none of the skits he wrote ever aired, he was a staff writer at Saturday Night Live at a most interesting time, when Michael O’Donoghue had returned to the fold and brought such esoteric talents as the legendary Terry Southern with him.
In 1997, O’Donnell concocted an original rhyming prologue for the Long Wharf Theatre’s production of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. The prologue was commissioned by the show’s director, Doug Hughes, and the production opened Hughes’ first season as the Long Wharf’s artistic director.
I remember a wonderful chat with O’Donnell, sitting next to him on opening night of Dan Hurlin’s The Shoulder at Long Wharf. I told him, somewhat nervously, that I’d introduced dozens of people to his Freudian-slip one-act “Marred Bliss” via a playreading gang I ran at Rudy’s bar, he was thrilled and had lots of questions about how my humble gang chose its scripts.
O’Donnell taught a seminar in humor writing for Yale undergraduates. We were both non-drivers, so would often run into each other on downtown New Haven sidewalks.
The first time I interviewed him “officially,” as theater columnist for the New Haven Advocate, it was when Hairspray’s first national tour came to the Oakdale Theater. I wasn’t sure how Hairspray had changed his life, and was pleased to find him as down-to-earth as ever, happy to be getting offers from those who appreciated him. Among those was the adaptation of another Waters film, Crybaby.
Mark O’Donnell’s air of level-headed levity was confirmed for me by John Waters’ brief and thoughtful remarks when I spoke to him last week.
“There were a lot of people whose lives were changed by Hairspray,” Waters told me. “They made money. They bought things. With Mark, there was no visible change. He still lived in a little apartment in the village. He was unchanged.”
O’Donnell, Waters continued, was “a great guy to work with.” Waters professes to have been as pleased with the adaptation of Crybaby as he was with Hairspray. “I loved Crybaby,” he says, and expresses disappointment that it didn’t do better. He feels that as “the sexiest family musical on Broadway,” it was a hard sell.
In case you were wondering, John Waters has no new theatrical projects in the works, though he does encounter live audiences regularly through his speaking tours and odd one-night events like the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s “Hairspray in Concert,” which he will narrate.
So, for the time being, John Waters’ Broadway voice is also the late Mark O’Donnell’s Broadway voice.