CRY-BABY
“I’m tired of being good,” says sweet little Allison Vernon-Williams near the beginning of Cry-Baby, the new musical comedy by John Waters. This WASP beauty with the double-barreled handle, whose closest flirtation with sin has probably been mixing plaids with stripes, is a prom-queen type at her Baltimore high school in 1954 until she utters those magic words while gazing with barely bridled lust at cute leather punk Cry-Baby Walker. For Allison, the results of the utterance are as dramatic as they were for Dorothy when she whispered, “There’s no place like home,” except that Allison is swept off in another direction, away from home’s satin-pillow security and toward the thrilling world of JDs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll.
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In Cry-Baby, Waters filters 50s memories through the cultural apparatus that was meant to purify the period’s profane goings-on for mass consumption, the old-style teen exploitation film. Those movies–like the immortal High School Confidential!–were the bastard children of De Millean biblical epics, remixing the old moralists’ recipe of hoochie-koo and don’t-you-dare into the familiar brew of downbeat titillation. Waters changes the formula, however, to produce an upside-down celebration of adolescent license. Rather than ending up governed by adult sensibility, these kids embrace joyful nonsense.
The leading players don’t make Cry-Baby a bash, however, so much as its gallery of eccentric supporting actors. And no one is funnier or more of a presence than former porn star Traci Lords, who here displays a fierce comic talent that should put most of her mainstream colleagues to shame. Wearing a scowl that could stop a tank in its tracks, Lords is only the toughest and most fearsome of the trio of hard-boiled ladies who make up the female, and more animated, half of Cry-Baby’s gang. With her sisters in delinquency–played by Hairspray star Ricki Lake and newcomer Kim McGuire, whose character’s name, Hatchet-Face, only begins to do justice to her shocking visage–Lords preaches her gospel: “Our tits are weapons.”
