Award-winning Hairspray writer Mark O’donnell

MARK O’DONNELL, the TonyAward-winning writer behind Hairspray has died, aged 58.

O’Donnell’s agent Jack Tantleff said the theatre writer collapsed in the lobby of his apartment complex on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, NewYork.

“He was a huge talent, and a warm, witty and wonderful man who marched to his own drummer,” Tantleff said.

O’Donnell won the 2003 Tony for best book of a musical for co-writing Hairspray withThomas Meehan, and the pair earned nominations in 2008 for doing the same for another John Waters work, Cry-Baby.

He was picked to help write the musical version of the 1988 Waters movie Hairspray because producer Margo Lion felt he “could appreciateWaters’voice but was idiosyncratic enough to inject his own personality into the piece”.

The story centres on an overweight white teenager who lives to dance on The Corny Collins Show, Baltimore’s version of American Bandstand. She also wants to integrate its all-white environs, and, along the way, be accepted for her full-figured self.

“The structure I had in mind was: Girl does Mash Potato, girl charms Baltimore, girl integrates nation,” O’Donnell said in 2002. “My script was like a great Mad magazine article.”

His other plays include That’s It, Folks!, Fables For Friends, The Nice And The Nasty, Strangers On Earth, Vertigo Park and the musical Tots In Tinseltown. He wrote two novels, Getting Over Homer and Let Nothing You Dismay, and published two collections of comic stories, Elementary Education and Vertigo Park And Other Tales. He also adapted Georges Feydeau’s Private Fittings for the La Jolla Playhouse in California and a symphonic version of Pyramus And Thisbe for the Kennedy Centre.