Dolling up the dances. (Dance Theater).

FOR THOSE OF US WHOSE TEEN YEARS overlapped with the 1960s, the words "Wa, wa wa Watusi," call up a horde of crisply remembered outfits, hairstyles, songs, and, of course, dances. For Jerry Mitchell, who's sure to get another Tony nomination for turning the Watusi, the twist, the pony, the locomotion, the hully gully, and other '60s dance crazes into the joyous choreography of Hairspray, it was all research.

At 42, he's too young to remember the steps that could be seen near any jukebox in 1962, when Hairspray is set. John Kennedy was in the White House, duplicates of Jackie's bouffant hairdo were being back-combed in front of fancy vanities and bare bathroom mirrors, and the social upheavals to come were still largely invisible, simmering beneath the surface. John Waters used his 1988 film comedy both to satirize and glorify the period, and the show takes the same affectionately ironic tone toward the doings at Patterson Park High School in Baltimore. That's where Tracy Turnblad (played in the movie by Ricki Lake and in the show by Marissa Jaret Winokur) is desperately trying to be cool despite her plus-size figure, her loving but rather grotesque parents, and her unpopular insistence that segregation is wrong. And for Tracy--as well as for millions of real teenagers across the country--the very coolest thing is to be one of the regulars on the American Bandstand clone on local TV.

So, Mitchell says, he met with two people who had danced as teenagers on The Buddy Deane Show, Baltimore's version of Dick Clark's prototype. They taught him the Madison, the line dance that originated in Baltimore and then swept the country. He watched American Bandstand shows broadcast from 1958 to 1962, as well as tapes of Shindig and Hullabaloo, two other teen must-sees from the '60s. But he found that the steps on the two later shows "looked too much like professional dancers dancing for the camera," he says. "On Bandstand, the dancers looked like they were dancing with each other, and that was important for me. I wanted to get that flavor for the show."

Did he ever. The songs of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman capture the infectious beat and shining innocence of early '60s rock 'n' roll, and Mitchell matches them with frisky dance numbers that look dead-on accurate but somehow new. He accomplishes this by using the dance steps he found in his research and "dolling them up"--but not so much that they lose their authenticity.

In Hairspray, when the ensemble does the Madison in the high school gym, there are variations on the basic step that originated in Mitchell's head rather than in Baltimore in the '60s. He changes the formations a bit to give the dance more visual interest. And, he says, "The working foot in the real Madison is the left; but I switched it to the right, because I'm a rightie." (In theater, realism always has to stop somewhere!) But Mitchell worked hard to be true to the period, going so far as to tell William Ivey Long, the show's brilliant costume designer, that he wanted the dancers to wear outfits that would actually have been available at the time. "If a dancer is wearing a kick-pleat skirt and she can't do my step," he said, "I've got to change the step."

MITCHELL ALSO ECHOES THE SOCIAL segregation of the time in the choreography, giving the white teenagers the chaste, hopping footwork of the pony while the black teenagers grind their hips and bump their pelvises. "I wanted the black kids to have the sex and the soul," he says. "I wanted to maintain the difference."

One thing he didn't do was try to replicate the movie. "I had seen Hairspray when it first came out," he says. "And when I was offered the musical, I watched the movie once--the same thing I did with The Full Monty. Then I never went back. You could fall into a real pit if you watch it too much, because in a movie, the camera tells an audience where to look. Onstage, your dance has to tell 2,500 heads where to look."

With Tracy fixated on getting herself and her black friends onto a teen dance show, Mitchell's choreography is often telling 2,500 heads to look at the twist and the hully gully. But judging by the ovation that came from the crowd the night I went, the most successful number has nothing to do with rock 'n' roll at all. In "Timeless to Me," Harvey Fierstein and Dick Latessa, playing Tracy's parents, do a nostalgic soft-shoe. Mitchell stages it in front of a curtain--"That's what makes it timeless," he says--and ends it with Fierstein, in full padding and flamboyant drag, following Latessa offstage with a little backwards kick that has the dramatic impact of a full-out Bolshoi arabesque.

"You could watch two brilliant dancers do that number and it wouldn't go over as well," Mitchell says. "Jerome Robbins once told me: `Watching actors dancing is always more exciting than watching dancers act.' Dick and Harvey make that dance more magical than I could ever have imagined."

Sylviane Gold has written about theater for the Boston Phoenix, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, The New York Times, and other publications.