Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Broadway musicals don’t usually showcase iconic queer heroes and especially one like Hedwig. This conflicted victim of a botched gender change op back in East Berlin - leaving her with a one angry inch of penis - was developed in a New York punk drag bar in the 1990s.

Writer John Cameron Mitchell and composer/lyricist Stephen Trask then fashioned it for the stage, a film in 2001 and into a Broadway hit by 2014.

We meet Hedwig abandoned by her former stage partner and lover who has run off with her songs and made himself the star she wants to be.  Back again selling cheap blowjobs, she’s living in a US trailer park, but with her small band sings out loud for the misunderstood and unloved.

Beyond her bitching and smutty talk, what’s so appealing and universal about Hedwig is her raw vulnerability and determination to climb out of each gutter. Her battling spirit is intrinsic to Mitchell’s score with its yearning and poignancy, influenced surely by rock songs last century from the likes of Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop and David Bowie.  And Hedwig’s angst converts into some farcical black humour.

Staged here more as concert than theatre, Jeremy Allen’s design squeezes the four musicians into a pit under a sumptuous circular curtain, as Hedwig struts around the perimeter or (effectively) works on the stairs behind.

As Hedwig, Seann Miley Moore is an energetic, expansive performer and powerful singer.  He’s buffed and handsome, almost too much so: Hedwig arguably isn’t blessed with good looks. 

It’s essentially a solo show except for an angular and morose Adam Noviello as Hedwig’s Jewish husband and support singer, Yitzhak, who she treats with disdain. Later Yitzhak has the chance to get back to drag and steal some spotlight.

The set and staging is oddly cramped (made small for touring) but the direction by Shane Anthony and Dino Dimitriadis is inventive and interactive. Costumes by Nicol and Ford aptly employ denim, with its working man associations, reworked with flair.

What the show lacks is an actor’s clarity of storytelling; the jumpy narrative easily confuses and without good versing from Moore we loose details. And in song and speech, Moore invokes little of that vitally required empathy; no tears here for her pain or heart-felt relief. Hedwig and the Angry Inch lacks emotional truth. 

iOTA delivered that in spades when he played her (and won a Helpmann) in a remarkable Sydney production 20 years ago. This groundbreaking musical, then and in the 90’s, was utterly prescient of the weaponised arguments today around gender identity and transsexual recognition.  Quite a milestone.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Eugene Hyland