The Signature Theatre in the Washington DC area produced the show in 2002. On February 15, 2007, a new on-stage version was released, starting at Shinjuku Face in Tokyo, translation by Kitamaru Yuji and starring Koji Yamamoto. Rebel’s friend Hugh Sheridan was cast in the lead role of Hedwig … Mitchell embarked on the tour to raise money for medical costs related to his mother, who suffers from late-stage Alzheimer's. In the 2014 Broadway Revival, a small subplot was added to the script, and a small number was added to support it. The show was produced by TheatreLAB and Spin, Spit & Swear in Richmond, Virginia in October 2014. The creators of the show Hedwig and the Angry Inch have weighed in to a casting row that led to the producers of an upcoming Australian production pulling the show from January’s Sydney festival. By the time the musical officially arrived on Broadway in 2014, repackaged for tourists and families in Times Square, there was an undeniable gloss to the show, but its energy and power remained intact. The Broadway production had the song prepared to play in case Hedwig had to leave the stage, along with "Freaks", a song from the movie. It was for this occasion that Mike Potter first designed Hedwig's trademark wig, which was initially constructed from toilet paper rolls wrapped with synthetic blond hair. Alternate Character Interpretation: The stage show is sometimes interpreted to say that Tommy and Hedwig are the same person. A One-Inch Mound of Flesh: Troubling Queer Identity in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 2016, The musical follows Hedwig Robinson, a genderqueer East German singer of a fictional rock and roll band. [73] It adds to the increasing number of mainstream films and media that questions dichotomous views on sex and gender. In both productions, Hedwig was played by Chanudol Suksatit. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Even though Yitzhak sings backup on almost all numbers in the show, the songs below that are labeled with Hedwig with Yitzhak are ones where he has notable solo lines. In 1990, Mitchell was an aspiring playwright and erstwhile actor en route to New York from Los Angeles when he met musician Stephen Trask, the only other person not watching the in-flight movie. [61] Hedwig explains that because it closed so quickly, she was able to convince one of the producers to allow her to use what would have been an otherwise empty and unused stage. Occasionally Hedwig opens a door onstage to listen to Gnosis's concert, which is playing in an adjoining venue. In the summer of 1994, they started workshopping the show at the downtown NYC gay punk club SqueezeBox!, where Trask led the house band. Tonight, we’re the lucky audience members for her concert, and she promises this show will not only be her music but her story. [79] The show's authenticity, and its use of characters outside the usual hetero-normative constraints of theatre, was also remarked upon.[80][79]. One of the bonus tracks of Damn Skippy, "Pirate In A Box" by Lemon Demon, is a parody of Wig In a Box. Hedwig, which opened to raves off-Broadway in 1998, has spawned productions from Manila to Iceland.A film version was inevitable and, I thought, inevitably awful. The character of Hedwig was inspired by a German divorced U.S. Army wife who was Mitchell's family babysitter and moonlighted as a prostitute at her trailer park home in Junction City, Kansas. [19], On March 23, 2006 Hedwig and the Angry Inch premiered at Metropol Wien[20] in Vienna. It was also nominated for Best Costume Design for a Musical (Arianne Phillips), who also did the costumes for the original 2001 film. The musical follows Hedwig Robinson, a genderqueer East German singer of a fictional rock and roll band. Hedwig’s journey to a whole sense of self, realized at the end of the film in an ambiguously Lynchian rebirth, isn’t about living between male and female, or any of her tortured romances. The show got rave reviews in the Netherlands. "She's a gender of one and that is accidentally so beautiful."[3]. [39][40][41] A new edition of the musical started August 31, 2019, at Tokyo Ex Theater Roppongi, with Neko Oikawa's lyrics, Kenji Urai as the main character, and Avu Barazono as Yitzhak; and with DURAN (Gt), YUTARO (Ba), Kusunose Takuya (Dr), Hideyuki Ohashi (Gt), Akane Otsuka (Key) as members of the band THE ANGRY INCH.[42]. In Korea and Japan, a number of teen idols and respected actors have played the role and inspired a large number of young, female Hedheads. It was directed by Katherine Linton and produced by the Sundance Channel and is now available on DVD. Meat Loaf covered "Tear Me Down" that same year on his album Couldn't Have Said It Better, modifying some of the lyrics (notably the spoken section about the Berlin Wall) so that the song is instead about Texas and Meat Loaf's own life. [74] Instead of a conventional transgender narrative that looks at an individual's account of gender dysphoria, Hedwig and the Angry Inch focuses on the main character's journey of finding love “by looking within.”[75] There were another 7 performances scheduled for February 2014 in Brasilia and Recife, finalizing the Brazilian Hedwig project with a total of 100 performances. Hedwig’s journey is recast as a flashback-heavy tour of shoddy seafood restaurants, which is really just a guise for stalking Tommy’s stadium tour. Die Handlung orientiert sich am Lebenslauf von Jayne County. Rechristened Hedwig, she was plopped down in Junction City and soon left to fend for herself. The same production reopened in São Paulo on August 26, 2011, and ran until October 16, 2011, for a total of 25 performances, now with actors Pierre Baitelli and Felipe Carvalhido playing Hedwig. Hedwig and the Angry Inch Critics Consensus. Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a 2001 American musical comedy-drama film written for the screen and directed by John Cameron Mitchell. However, in the 2014 Broadway Revival, Yitzhak sings the song instead. [33] Shortly after, the production released a single recorded in quarantine,[34] which was praised by author Stephen Trask as "one of the best Wicked Little Town versions ever. Today the movie stands as Hedwig’s purest depiction, as vulgar and unfettered as intended. Hedwig and the Angry Inch premiered Off-Broadway at the Jane Street Theatre on February 14, 1998, and closed on April 9, 2000, after 857 performances. Holly M Sypniewski, “The Pursuit of Eros in Plato’s Symposium and Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” International Journal of the Classic Tradition 15, 4 (2008): 562. She wrote music and dated/mentored Tommy, a confused teen who eventually dumped her, stole her songs, and scored it big as a proto-Marilyn Manson. During the life-affirming punk anthem “Wig in a Box,” her Kansas trailer opens up into a stage bedecked with lights and a lyric scrawl along the bottom of the screen, for Rocky Horror-style karaoke potential. Other notable figures who have portrayed Hedwig include Donovan Leitch, Jr., the glam-rocker son of sixties folk-rock composer Donovan. The rock’n’roll drag diva played by John Cameron Mitchell in Hedwig and the Angry Inch was born 31,000 feet in the sky. [58], After Lena Hall left the production on April 4, 2015, Rebecca Naomi Jones took over as Yitzhak on April 14, 2015, following a week-long stint with Shannon Conley in the role.[59]. some 20 years later, that brief memory of Helga spun out into Hedwig’s winged Farrah Fawcett wig, towering heels, and torn fishnet stockings. Hedwig believes that Tommy is her soulmate and that she cannot be whole without him, but he is disgusted when he discovers that she is not biologically female and abandons her ("The Long Grift"). However, in order to be married, the couple must consist of a man and a woman. This same production performed again in Rio de Janeiro from April 4–22, 2012, and a tour to Curitiba, performing April 26–29, 2012, for a total of 16 performances. [22], Several productions were shown in Frankfurt/Main in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 and Berlin in 2002, 2013 and 2014. Eline Porto played Yitzhak, Alexandre Griva on the drums, Fabrizio Iorio on the keyboards, Patrick Laplan on the bass, and Pedro Nogueira playing the guitar. A song performed by Yitzhak and the band, "Random Number Generation" was included on the Off-Broadway Cast Album, but does not appear in the score. Der Kinostart von Hedwig and the Angry Inch ist unbekannt. Das Musical wurde im Jahr 2001 mit der Besetzung der Off-Broadway … Feffer, Steve. [68], From November 29, 2016, to July 2, 2017, Euan Morton and Hannah Corneau portrayed Hedwig and Yitzhak, respectively, with Mason Alexander Park continuing on as the Hedwig Standby/Alternate and Shannon Conley as the Yitzhak standby. From October 2 through to November 2, 2013, Ghost Light Projects returned the production to Vancouver for a five-week engagement at The Cobalt. Hedwig and the Angry Inch follows “the journey of a young East Berlin man who has a sex change as part of a plan to escape to the capitalist west” as the synopsis reads. But the settled past became the urgent present in January when the acclaimed director unleashed a spectacular new version at the Aurora Fox that seamlessly joined past and present like two sides of a missing whole. The music is steeped in the androgynous 1970s glam rock style of David Bowie (who co-produced the Los Angeles production of the show), as well as the work of John Lennon and early punk performers Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. They collaborate on songs and begin a relationship. “But the operation is botched, and Hedwig’s angry inch refers to his anatomical stump created by the surgeon’s inept knife.” Hedwig became the story's protagonist when Trask encouraged Mitchell to showcase their earliest material in 1994 at NYC's drag-punk club Squeezebox, where Trask headed the house band and Mitchell's boyfriend, Jack Steeb, played bass. Mitchell, Trask, and the band Cheater (Jack Steeb, Chris Wielding, Dave McKinley, and Scott Bilbrey) continued to workshop material at venues such as Fez Nightclub and Westbeth Theater Center for four years before premiering the completed musical Off-Broadway in 1998. On their first wedding anniversary, Luther leaves Hedwig for a man. Henry, Matthew. As Mitchell, director of the film adaptation, acknowledges, through recurring motifs of “the divided self, the divided city of Berlin…divided gender…”[77] the theme of dualism pervades the entire musical. In August 2010, a Brazilian adaptation of Hedwig and the Angry Inch premiered in Rio de Janeiro, with Paulo Vilhena and Pierre Baitelli playing Hedwig. Mitchell's second gig was as fill-in host at Squeezebox on a bill featuring singer Deborah Harry of Blondie. to Broadway, we trace the history of everyone’s favorite German transgender rock goddess Neil Patrick Harris starred in the first Broadway production at the Belasco Theatre, which began previews on March 29, 2014, and officially opened on April 22, 2014. Hedwig and The Angry Inch was originally presented at the Westbeth Theatre Center on February 27, 1997 by David Binder. Hedwig and the Angry Inch may very well be the next Rocky Horror midnight movie. Hedwig grows more erratic and unstable as the evening progresses, until she finally breaks down, stripping off her wig, dress, and make-up, forcing Yitzhak to step forward and sing ("Hedwig's Lament"/"Exquisite Corpse"). Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe. In June 2014, Sven Ratzke (as Hedwig) brought the Berlin Production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch for a three-week run to Amsterdam (location: De Kleine Komedie), Utrecht (Stadsschouwburg Utrecht) and Eindhoven (Parktheater Eindhoven). "She’s a gender of one, and that is accidentally so beautiful."[3]. [5] The theater was located in the ballroom of the Hotel Riverview, which once housed the surviving crew of the Titanic (a fact which figured in the original production). She's forced into this [sex change] operation. And the music is still as potent as ever, a brew of swaggering glam rock, mournful singer-songwriter ballads, and searing punk blasts. But when influential independent film producer Christine Vachon inquired about a screen adaptation, Mitchell got right back into Hedwig’s heels to star and direct. Hedwig and the Angry Inch didn’t exactly begin as a story about a flamboyant rocker, but instead a meek Army general’s son. (Hedwig’s queerness aside, Mitchell cast actress Miriam Shor as her aggrieved ex-drag queen husband/backup singer, further challenging the audience’s assumptions about gender in theater and rock’n’roll.) Hedwig subsequently develops a relationship with a younger man, Tommy, becoming his mentor and musical collaborator, only to have Tommy steal her music and become a rock star. Mitchell himself moved more than 20 times as the child of an Army commandant, a lifestyle that isolated him as a young person struggling with his sexuality. Die FSK-Einstufung ist unbekannt. The concept of the stage production is that the audience is watching genderqueer rock singer Hedwig Robinson's musical act as she follows rockstar Tommy Gnosis' (much more successful) tour around the country. Other bands who participated in "Wig in a Box" were Yo La Tengo featuring Yoko Ono, Sleater-Kinney featuring Fred Schneider (of The B-52's), Jonathan Richman, Rufus Wainwright, Polyphonic Spree, Spoon, Imperial Teen, Bob Mould, Cyndi Lauper with The Minus Five (featuring Peter Buck of R.E.M. "[83] "She's more than a woman or a man," he has explained. The two built the foundation for Hedwig for over a year, incorporating far-reaching and idiosyncratic inspirations: Plato’s symposiums, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, and malleable gender performances from the glam-rock era.