Everything's coming up Hairspray: when John Waters and Harvey Fierstein get together on Broadway, it's ... divine! (arts & entertainment).

Harvey Fierstein is not having any questions about Divine. Because he is playing Edna Turnblad in the $10.5 million Broadway-bound adaptation of Hairspray, a role originated by the legendarily female impersonator, Fierstein gets all too many of those "queeny-bitchy questions about Divine." While he praises the actor as fearless ("He was proud of looking ugly," says Fierstein) and admits to a dubious connection--"We were used by the same people"--the man who created Torch Song Trilogy and Safe Sex insists he's "not playing Divine." Lest anyone miss the point, Fierstein adds, "I am an artist," with simultaneous mock-haughtiness and no-bull conviction.

The movie Hairspray is equally well-known for two things: First, it introduced (or inflicted upon us) Ricki Lake as Tracy Turnblad, an overweight teen determined to integrate an American Bandstand-like TV dance show in 1962 Baltimore. Second, the PG-rated Hairspray was the picture that earned transgressive director John Waters a mainstream fan base. It's easy to see why: In 1972's Pink Flamingos, which was banned in Australia, Waters's muse, Divine, ate dog poop; in Hairspray, as Tracy's mother, she gets a makeover.

Producer Margo Lion enthuses about the show's edge: "Like The Producers, it's not generic; it has a voice." It's also a universal Cinderella stow with a strong statement about civil rights, she notes, adding, "It's the story of our generation--we believed we could change the world. It's a celebration of what America does best. You look at the cast at curtain call: fat, thin, black, white, younger, older."

Fierstein at first dismisses such talk as sentimental: "This is no Sound-of-fucking-Music. If you get any kind of message out of it, good--send a check to your favorite charity." To harp on a message in this singing, dancing, zit-popping frolic (that scene now occurs in a song) "almost sounds like an excuse, when it's a fucking fun ride, a fucking fun show," he says. Still, he allows that Hairspray does promote "the power of saying yes ... allowing yourself your full potential."

Fierstein demonstrated precisely that power by winning his role after a half-hour vocal audition (Hairspray's songs were written by life partners Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman). He tells of doing an "entire concert," including "Love for Sale," his show-stopper from Torch Song, but didn't think it would go any further. The actor felt the producers were pacifying him "so when they turned me down, they could say they gave me a full shot." But instead he was told "they don't want anyone but you."

According to Lion, Waters "was reserved because he was so close to Divine. He was very polite to Harvey, but after the reading he was over the moon."

Asked if he did the "Broadway's Best on Bravo" concert in November to test his singing chops (Fierstein sang the Golde role of "Do You Love Me?" from Fiddler on the Roof with Shawn Colvin), Fierstein counters, "I don't need to test anything, darling. I tested myself at 16."

With the show playing in Seattle on its way to a scheduled August 15 opening in New York City, Fierstein likens audiences' enthusiastic response to that of La Cage aux Folles, the 1983 smash he scripted. His collaborators on that show, songwriter Jerry Herman and director Arthur Laurents, told him not to expect that twice, he says, "but with Hairspray it's happening again. At the end of the first act, they're standing up on their walkers screaming, and old ladies talk to me about Edna as if I wasn't Edna, which is flattering for an actor."

Fierstein is pleased that Edna is now more active, helping to determine the direction of the story. He praises his Hairspray daughter, Marissa Jaret Winokur ("There's something very real about her"), and even took advantage of his maternal prerogative to dispense some sage advice: "As her mother, I begged her not to host a talk show."

Limsky is a New York-based journalist.