Hairspray (2007 film) the 1988 John Waters film upon which the stage musical is based, became interested in adapting the stage show as a musical film. Development work began in late 2004, while a similarly film-to-Broadway-to-film project, Mel Brooks' "The Producers", was in production. Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, the executive producers of the Academy Award-winning film adaptation of the Broadway musical "Chicago", were hired as the producers for "Hairspray", and began discussing possibly casting John Travolta and Billy Crystal (or Jim Broadbent) as Edna and Wilbur Turnblad, respectively. Thomas Meehan and Mark O'Donnell, authors of the book for the stage musical, wrote
The Ball (play) simply a mistake, a point of confusion by the publishers: "The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France," a Chapman play that had been revised by Shirley, was printed in the same year by the same house. Traditional critics sometimes complained about the frothy amorality of "The Ball" — judging it to display a "coarseness...unflattering" to the social set depicted. Yet Herbert's adverse reaction to the accuracy of the play suggests that even the revised version may have a certain journalistic quality, showing what the Court of Charles I was actually like. "The Ball" portrays people of fashionable society preparing for