Stardust devils

The rise of Hedwig and the Angry Inch

by Gary Susman

NEW YORK -- "Ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not . . . Hedwig!"

So opens the already legendary Off Broadway rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which has been the toast of New York since it debuted a year ago. And so opens the show's newly released Original Cast Album, which Atlantic Records thinks could break through to the public at large the way no musical in the rock era ever has. Implicit in that line is a challenge: is America ready for a rock suite sung by and about an East German expatriate transsexual glam-punk trailer-park diva?

Hedwig is the creation of John Cameron Mitchell, who wrote the show's book and starred in it through January (currently filling the role is Michael Cerveris, who played the lead in the Who's Tommy on Broadway), and Stephen Trask, the keyboardist who composed the songs and lyrics and whose band, Cheater, portray Hedwig's band, the Angry Inch, in the show. Hedwig's story, as recounted in the songs on the record as well as in Mitchell's ruefully hilarious stage monologue, is the bittersweet tale of an East Berlin lad who, in order to marry his American GI boyfriend and escape to the West, agrees to a sex-change operation. The botched results leave Hansel, now Hedwig, with a one-inch lump of flesh and a genital-free "Barbie-doll crotch." Later, as an abandoned wife in a trailer home near a Midwestern Army base, Hedwig sings at coffee bars and babysits a general's family whose teenage son, Tommy Speck, she falls in love with and transforms into rock icon Tommy Gnosis. He, too, abandons Hedwig, and during the show, his concert at Giants Stadium can often be heard booming across the Hudson River. Hedwig and her second husband, a sullen, Serbian would-be drag performer named Yitzak (Miriam Shor), are left to puzzle through the mysteries of identity, gender, love, and the healing power of roof-raising rock and roll.

The 35-year-old Mitchell was a drag performer at the New York club Squeezebox, where Cheater (keyboardist Trask, guitarist Chris Weilding, bassist Scott Bilbrey, and drummer David McKinley) were the house band. "One of the things that brought us together," says the 32-year-old Trask, "was that we had both long wanted to reach across the boundaries of our fields. He'd been looking for a musician to work with for a while, and I'd been looking for a performer who knew about theatrics, some way of expanding beyond the barriers of rock music while still making rock music." Agrees Mitchell, "I wanted to write a piece that was purely theater and purely rock and roll and neither medium being compromised by the other, which often happens."

Mitchell's inspiration for Hedwig was a German-born prostitute named Helga who'd worked as a babysitter for his family when he was a Tommy Speck-like teenage Army brat in Junction City, Kansas. Hedwig's act, having grown from a couple of songs and jokes to a full 90 minutes of dialogue and music, found a fitting venue in the Jane Street Theatre, an elegantly decrepit former ballroom in the Hotel Riverside (known for housing the survivors of the Titanic), on the edge of Greenwich Village, by the piers that used to serve as a gay pick-up spot and more recently as the site of the annual dragfest Wigstock.

There the show has run since last Valentine's Day. Trask says, "I remember at the beginning asking my parents, in lieu of a wedding for me, to organize a trip with their friends in the third week of our run. Sixty of my parents' friends came to town. My parents hired a caterer and had a party in the back of the theater, and they all came to see it. They bought the tickets around opening night. I remember asking our director, who was also one of the producers, if he could guarantee me we would still be open in three weeks because it would be very embarrassing to have all my parents' friends return their tickets. He assured me, but I didn't believe him."

What's most surprising about the musical isn't its sustained popularity or its outlandish heroine but its identity as a "rock opera" whose rock songs genuinely rock. There really is no precedent for this -- not Rent, with its Stephen Sondheim-like score; not the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice collaborations like Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, which owe more to opera than to rock; not The Rocky Horror Show or Hair, whose scores weren't exactly rock and were not performed by a band in character on stage; not The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which, though it told a story and was performed in character by David Bowie and his band, never had a libretto; and not even Tommy, which also lacked spoken dialogue, and which became a Vegasy spectacle on Broadway. That no one else has ever created a book musical with a radio-ready rock score "is surprising for me," acknowledges Mitchell. "I know people have been trying to do that, but it never quite came across because one element or another didn't work. I think Stephen being an excellent writer and my experience being a theater person made a difference. But it took a long time and a lot of arguments to get that balance."

It's hard to predict whether the album will stand on its own for listeners who don't know the story or haven't seen the show, though the examples of Tommy and Ziggy Stardust bode well. It's certainly an excellent and diverse collection of songs, rousing, melodic, memorable, funny, heartbreaking, and grand. They include raging rockers (the glammy opening number and first single, "Tear Me Down," the furious "Angry Inch," the march-tempo "Wig in a Box," the hardcore "Exquisite Corpse"), epic ballads (the Lou Reed-ish "The Origin of Love," whose Plato-derived notion of love as a search for the missing part of us is the idea that defines both Hedwig and her story; the Beatlesque "Wicked Little Town," sung first by Hedwig and later as an apology by Tommy; the folky "The Long Grift," sung by Trask; and the anthemic closer, inspired by Ziggy's "Rock and Roll Suicide," called "Midnight Radio"), and even a galloping country two-step ("Sugar Daddy").

There's also a Fugazi-like number on the album that's not in the show; called "Random Number Generator," it's a vehicle for Shor's Yitzak. Explains Trask, "The inspiration was to have a presence for Yitzak on the album that is as significant as the one she has on stage. If Miriam didn't have a song, then she would just be a back-up singer who puts on a fake beard for the album cover. I wanted to write a song that has that same sort of edge and growl that the character has silently on stage."

Do the recordings capture the live spark of the show? Trask says the band had more room to improvise in the studio than in the timed-to-the-second stage performances. "We definitely had more freedom. Chris and I, after we laid down what was expected of us, we had time to fiddle around and do little things on the spot." Says Mitchell, "It was fun because I could sing differently than I could on stage, quieter, more subtly. But for the more energetic songs, it was hard to get that full-on energy that you get after you've done the show for an hour. One time, [producer] Brad Wood suggested I just carry a mike around instead of using one of those standing mikes for `Angry Inch,' and that seemed to work. But other songs, I listen to and say, `Ugh, that's kind of stiff compared to the way it is on stage.' We might be hitting the notes better, but it's hard to capture that. I'm sure bands have that problem all the time."

Indeed, not only are the songs missing a bit of the audience-feedback energy, but also, the theatrically trained Mitchell is not the rock-trained singer Cerveris is. Notes Trask, "Michael is much less feminine than John as Hedwig. But he's also an extraordinary rock performer. He has his own rock band, and he toured as a guitar player with Bob Mould. So there's a switch in the songs people get into the most. John found that `Sugar Daddy' and `Wig in a Box' were the real showstoppers. With Michael, it's `Angry Inch' and the suite at the end because he does those like a great rock show."

Mitchell, who left the show in order to write a screen adaptation of it for New Line, is relieved to have handed over the reins. "It's exciting because I feel like a writer. It's really fun to be in the audience and see your work interpreted by someone else. I'm looking forward to opening nights all over the world."

With the CD hitting stores this week, and a movie deal and eventual productions in other cities in the works, Mitchell finds himself as the CEO of an industry, Hedwig Inc. "It's scary. I don't want my life to be consumed by it. I could manage for the next 10 years to do nothing else. I want to avoid that. There's no danger of me micromanaging it because I'd be really bored by that. I try to focus on the next interesting thing to me, which is writing the film and directing it if I feel so inclined." He'd also star, along with Cheater and Shor.

Oddly, the one stop not on Hedwig's path toward world domination is Broadway. Says Mitchell, "Broadway was just never one we thought of because of the state of Broadway and the ticket prices and the tourists. We didn't think we'd have a sympathetic foundation of audience. We do have tourists who come to the show from Middle America, but we also have a core audience who get it or who have seen the show before and who can prime those other people. But I'm terrified of the idea of a purely uncomprehending audience seeing the play and not laughing."

Says Trask, "If we were actually writing for Broadway, there are a lot of rules, and you can't really vary from them because there's so much money involved. If you follow the rules, the likelihood that you're going to end up with a collection of songs you could sell as a regular pop-rock album is about nil. By operating in a world that didn't force us to conform to its rules, we were able to make something that would actually cross over to film better than, say, a Broadway show. The natural next step is an album and a movie because that's what we were writing in our heads."

Meanwhile, Hedwig is still drawing crowds of repeat visitors, newcomers, and all manner of celebrities, from Glenn Close to Bea Arthur to David Bowie. Of Bowie, Trask says, "I heard he loved it. I heard as recently as December, he was unaware that we'd become successful, and he was still interested in purchasing it."

One can imagine Bowie's kicking himself for missing out on that opportunity, or for not having written "Midnight Radio" himself.

Trask laughs. "Can you put that in the article?"