Casting skinny actors as fat characters

The style of Hairspray is very cartoon-esque. The sets are almost like cartoons and the mother is played by a man in a suit with breasts.
This falls in the category of Gaston in Beauty and The Beast with a muscle suit, The Butler in the Addams Family with shoes to make him extra tall and yes, a man who plays a woman caricature such as Edna or Ursula to me. You can't claim that audiences believe only 1 out of 2 characters in the same show, as the cartoon-esque style is the way the show is written. 

I would also like to add that some people on here make it sound like bigger people are excluded or something. That is not the case at all. I'm sure the casting directors do everything within their power to invite big girls to the Tracy auditions. I have seen several explicit urgent casting calls for that over the years.

And I'm also sure that if they find a girl who happens to be bigger, sings circles around the other candidates, is/can play the right type, character wise, can act through song very well, and has the condition and stamina to do 8 shows a week, they will hire her.

That goes for every physical aspect, no matter if it is being very tall or very muscular. In theatre, luckily we have a lot of possibilities to make it work.
If you make a point about this, and not about tall people or muscular people, you are actually the one excluding bigger people by putting them in an unfair victim role.

I think it is not an issue at all and works perfectly, the comedic side on the one hand and if well played the sincere emotional side as well.

It perfectly fits the exaggerated style of characters and looks of the show.

I do think we live in a world that is getting overly sensitive to an absurd point, where everyone is offended by everything, people lose every form of resilience, people lose the ability of seeing things in any perspective than their own, a world where people like to use a pencil eraser for everything that doesn't suit them or their insecurities, just swipe left and it doesn't exist, a world where 9 year olds have burn outs because they can't handle life, a world where studens don't come out of bed for 4 days because they couldn't recover from the fact that a computer was not available on tuesday morning in the school library and can't understand why it had to happen to them, a world where companies receive angry letters when using a beautiful model in their ads because not everyone looks like that in real life according to the writer, people campaigning that tv shows such as Idol and Top model must get taken down because not everyone is as talented and model-esque in real life, a world where "scream and stamp your feet" whenever a person is confronted with something that intimidates him/her or doesn't suit his/her insecurities until it's removed from the world and he/she feels included enough, is the norm, and I could go on for a while.

To get back to the point, some things are actually not issues, except in troubled minds. We should not give in to that. If we do, it's the beginning of the end.

It appears that you are more interested in the ills of the world. On a purely artistic level it makes no sense that Edna is cast as male; Hairspray is not a pantomime and the content and style it aims for never gets beyond a heightened realism into an area where such casting makes sense (Matilda maybe just about makes this but I can also understand those who say a male playing Trunchbull hurts that show as well).

I’m not a big fan of realism (theatrically, that is) and would much prefer a style where that sort of non traditional casting worked but they haven’t done that and, as a result, it’s unearned. I realise that many will like it because it’s funny but, as someone looking at it from a artistic perspective, I think it creates more problems than it solves.

The dog which isn't barking in this debate is the size of theatre seats in the West End.

There's always been a bit of debate around how there has never (as far as I know) been a genuinely wheelchair-bound actress cast as Nessa in Wicked.

Most Wheelchair users are able to stand/be mobile for short periods of time-obviously their mobility would influence whether they could take the role, but it's a valid point that there's no reason it CAN'T be a wheelchair user in that role (unlike others where you'd perhaps have to be running skipping jumping for act 1 then in a chair for act 2 )

They could easily stage it slightly differently or not have her in those scenes. On tour they have two flatheads instead of two and double up Dillamond and the Wizard.

If you'll permit me a moment to be That Person (when am I ever not?), 'wheelchair-bound' is inaccurate, as the term suggests a lack of freedom, and a wheelchair user finds the chair useful for just the opposite!