Top Five Songs: Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I just got my first chance to see a live performance of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, at a small theatre in Minneapolis, and this much is indisputable:  I love this score.  It’s probably the most genuinely-rock score in musical theatre, and I love how deftly the songs relate to the story, which is impressive for a show that’s set up like a concert.  Gun to my head, these are my absolute favorites.

“Tear Me Down” – I love the idea of Hedwig herself as a metaphor for the Berlin Wall, and that concept is a great introduction to her for the show.  This rowdy opening number gives us Hedwig’s origins and shows us hints of that in-between place where she exists.

Best lyric:  “There ain’t much of a difference / Between a bridge and a wall. / Without me right in the middle, babe, / You would be nothin’ at all.”

“The Origin of Love” – Just masterful.  A gorgeous fable, a rock-ballad retelling of Plato’s Symposium, replete with gods, fire, and humans severed from the other halves of themselves.  It’s a definite rock number, but the narrative is beautiful, and the way it rises and falls is just so theatrical.

Best lyric:  “Last time I saw you, / We had just split in two. / You were looking at me. / I was looking at you.  You had a way so familiar, / I could not recognize, / ‘Cause you had blood on your face; / I had blood in my eyes. / But I could swear by your expression / That the pain down in your soul / Was the same as the one down in mine.”

“Wig in a Box” – Oh, I love this song, an emotional journey of self-discovery expressed in wigs.  The plaintive opening verse is exquisitely gentle, and I love how it gives over to the driving beat that follows the chorus.  The music-video treatment this song gets in the movie is perfect.

Best lyric:  “I look back on where I’m from, / Look at the woman I’ve become, / And the strangest things seem suddenly routine.”

“Wicked Little Town (Reprise)” – Don’t get me wrong; I love the first version of this song, too.  But I just adore the lyrics of the reprise, and the chance to hear the Hedwig actor playing Tommy is too good to pass up.  This song is just what Hedwig needs, right when she needs it most.

Best lyric:  “Forgive me, for I did not know, / ‘Cause I was just a boy, / And you were so much more / Than any god could ever plan, / More than a woman or a man, / And now I understand how much I took from you.”

“Midnight Radio” – And here, after all the posturing and wallowing, all the spite and pain, the closing number brings with it some peace as Hedwig finally finds a way to reconcile herself.  The self-love in this number is so pure and triumphant, it’s just stunning.

Best lyric:  “Know in your soul, / Like your blood knows the way / From your heart to your brain, / Knows that you’re whole.”

Favorite Characters: Yitzhak (Hedwig and the Angry Inch)

Yitzhak is maybe an odd character to feature.  If Tommy Gnosis stands between Hedwig and the fame she wants, then Hedwig stands between Yitzhak and his.  Even with Hedwig’s admittedly piddly spotlight, Yitzhak is always in the shadow.  He’s the eternal backup vocalist, given no opportunities to show off and no outlet to be the beauty he longs to become.  In movie, he probably has less than a dozen lines.  And yet, I kind of love him.  (Note – I’m pulling in both the stage show and the film for today’s post.  Yitzhak-related spoilers.)

At first glance, Yitzhak looks out of place in the Angry Inch.  Hedwig – the high diva in command – is naturally at the center of everything, with audaciously tacky outfits, loud makeup, and wigs that deserve their own stage credit, and the rest of the band is styled in varying shades of punk/glam pastiche.  Next to all that color, glitter, and androgyny, Yitzhak doesn’t seem to fit.  Nothing form-fitting, nothing flamboyant.  Loose T-shirts and baggy jeans, bandanas and leather jackets.  Long, limp rocker hair and a goatee.  One of these things is not like the others.

And yet, right away, there’s more to be seen here.  Yitzhak is a male character, by all accounts a cisgender one, but he’s pretty much always played by a woman.  Miriam Shor, pictured above, originated the role of Yitzhak Off-Broadway and reprised it in the movie.  So we have this very traditionally-masculine-looking guy with kind of sullen impressions, but there’s something soft and feminine in his face.  His singing voice tends to be the same way, surprising the listener with sudden threads of femininity that seem to emerge from nowhere.

The movie keeps Yitzhak’s woes while skipping his backstory, so elements can feel a bit out-of-the-blue, but the stage show reveals that Yitzhak was once one of Croatia’s finest drag queens.  The Jewish Yitzhak needed to get out of the country, and when he met Hedwig, he was willing to do anything to leave with her.  She agreed to take him along, but at a cost.  Hedwig always needs to be the most beautiful person on stage, and if Yitzhak was going to join her, he could never dress in drag again.  “To be free, one must give up a little part of oneself,” she told him, echoing the words that led to her ticket out of Communist East Berlin:  her botched transition surgery.

That’s where Yitzhak’s head is when we meet him.  His own spark is dulled to make another’s brighter by comparison, and it’s not just with the heels or the wigs.  Hedwig is an incurable spotlight hog who feels threatened by Yitzhak’s talent; in the movie, the last moments of “Tear Me Down” tell you everything you need to know about their relationship.  As Hedwig gears up for her big finish, she’s resentful of Yitzhak’s riffing and coolly walks over to yank the cord out of his microphone.  As a sort-of couple (they’re married – might have been a green card thing for Yitzhak?), they’re hugely dysfunctional.  Hedwig constantly belittles and undermines Yitzhak, she takes him utterly for granted, and she’s hidden his passport.  Yitzhak wants to get out from under her thumb but doesn’t know how, and despite everything, he still can’t quite help loving her.  But for Yitzhak, the chief grievances are the first two – that Hedwig denies him his beauty and pushes his talent to the side.  He’s a natural star who can’t let loose, a gorgeous queen who can’t strut.  Shor does such a terrific job in the film bringing these injustices to the fore, packing a lot of emotion into wordless scenes and making you feel how incredibly important both issues are to him.  In a story where the protagonist has such a tangled, colorful history, it’s cool to discover that the taciturn backup singer has hidden dreams and inner turmoil as well.

On Hedwig and Transgender Identity

To be fair, Hedwig and the Angry Inch was created a long time ago in trans representation terms.  The off-Broadway show opened in 1998, after The Crying Game but before Boys Don’t Cry.  This was ages before Laverne Cox, Caitlin Jenner, and the present still-messy-but-generally-trying-to-sort-itself world of trans representation.  All of which is to say, I expect Hedwig to get stuff wrong, and I don’t expect its portrayal to be entirely without offense.  (A few spoilers.)

That said, there’s still some craziness here, enough that I tend to think of Hedwig as transsexual, a term I usually bristle at, rather than transgender.  That’s because I don’t really see Hedwig identifying as female prior to her mishandled gender reassignment surgery.  The impression I get is that, pre-operation, “slip of a girly boy” Hansel merely wants to pose as a woman to get out of East Berlin with his American boyfriend.  He would maybe reassume the pretense on occasion for Green Card purposes, but it seems to me that it’s only intended to be “pretend.”  It isn’t until Hansel’s boyfriend points out that they have to marry before they leave – which, in East Germany, means a complete physical – that surgery is proposed and Hedwig is born.

So, instead of a trans woman whose gender reassignment is botched, we have a gay man who “becomes” a woman in a desperate bid to escape Communism, whose “sex-change” is botched.  That’s different.  It’s also totally wild, more of a comment on how much East Berlin sucked than an exploration of trans identity, with a helping of how rough it must’ve been to be gay in East Germany in the 1980s.  This is so different that I can’t get too outright upset at Hedwig for it (it’s also the reason I don’t really mind men playing the character.)  After all, this is a blatantly fanciful scenario that doesn’t pretend to resemble the lives of trans people.  Its greatest sin is that it can confuse the conversation and reinforce the false notion that someone “decides” to be trans.  To be sure, these aren’t small potatoes, but again, the whole story is so outrageous that I hope most would know not to use it as a crash-course in trans identity.

Despite the muddle, however, the show still provides some interesting insight into gender, even if it’s not as trans-specific as one might initially think.  I’m intrigued that, even though Hansel never gave any indication of identifying as female, once the surgery is over, Hedwig absolutely considers herself a woman, from the pronouns on.  Due to the complications with the operation, she feels “in-between,” not entirely one or the other, but after the surgery, she definitely lives as female.  I wonder why this is.  Is she simply making the best of “what [she has] to work with?”  Is it because she likes the wigs, heels, and glitter, none of which are categorically female but tend to be coded that way?  Is it because, having lost her penis, she feels she’s not allowed to be a man?  It isn’t until the very end of the show that Hedwig seems to come around to a more male identity again.  It’s not entirely clear; the change in Hedwig’s tattoo shows that the two half-faces have come together, so it may be that Hedwig is acknowledging herself as equally male and female, and she’ll decide in her own time what that looks like.  What is evident is that this is when Hedwig appears to come to terms with herself.  This could take us back to problematic territory if it’s suggesting that Hedwig has stopped “pretending” and has gone back to being male as he was “supposed to be,” but then, if Hedwig didn’t originally identify as female, it shouldn’t be wrong to stop doing so.  Still, if the outside concerns can be put aside for a minute (not to downplay them, but this whole situation is so tangled that it’s hard get much traction,) that finale image of Hedwig, at peace with whoever she or he may be, is a strong one.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001, R)

Expect a few Hedwig-related posts in the coming days.  There’s plenty that I love about this off-Broadway-show-turned-cult-film (we’re looking at the movie today,) and the murkiness of its trans representation warrants discussion.  For now, though, we’re starting simple with a review of this bizarre but highly-enjoyable film.

What you need to know:  Hedwig is an East German rocker currently touring America’s nationwide chain of Bilgewater restaurants.  She was born male but underwent gender reassignment surgery in order to marry her American G.I. beau and get to the U.S.; no time to unpack all this today, but it’s coming, believe me.  Unfortunately, the operation was bungled, leaving her with an “angry inch” (also the name of her band) in the nether regions.  This history is rolled out gradually over the course of her wildly-inappropriate restaurant gigs, along with her past with rock god Tommy Gnosis, a former collaborator who won fame from Hedwig’s music.

So, yeah.  Not something you see every day.  Hedwig is wild and raucous, with a campy sense of humor and a flair for the outrageous.  Hedwig herself is a piece of work – her songwriting and singing talent is undeniable, and there’s no doubt that she’s been kicked around far more than her fair share, but she’s also vain, demanding, and vindictive.  She has a powerful need to be the prettiest, she requires nothing less than the audience’s full attention, and she lets her grievances against Tommy make most of her decisions for her.  Still, she’s an absolute hoot and imminently watchable, and the film follows her journey that, at its core, is to find some peace for herself.

The music is just phenomenally good.  Penned by Stephen Trask (who, incidentally, also composed the film score for The Station Agent,) these are genuinely gritty rock numbers that don’t sound like anything else you hear in musical theatre.  The songs don’t tell the story in the traditional musical sense – there are no characters bursting into song to advance the plot.  Instead, they’re generally framed as performances, with the odd dream sequence or music-video-style tangent here and there.  They still provide a lot of insight into the story, however, because Hedwig writes extensively from her own experiences.  Through her performances, we get her feelings on love, gender, her origins, and her ever-present sense that she has her feet in two different camps and is never entirely one thing or the other.

In the cast, the main attraction is John Cameron Mitchell as Hedwig.  He created the show, originated the role off-Broadway, and has played it multiple times onstage since then, so there’s no one who knows the hard-edged rock diva quite as well as him.  Michael Pitt, who gave us a wonderfully creepy Mason Verger on Hannibal, really works as Tommy, and I just love Miriam Shor in the role of Yitzhak, Hedwig’s backup singer and long-suffering boyfriend?/husband?/something or other.

Warnings

Thematic elements, sexual content (including offscreen hand jobs and oodles of innuendo,) swearing, and drinking.

Top Five Performances: 2014 Tony Awards

The musical performances loom large in any Tony telecast, so it seemed ripe for a little Top Five treatment.  Here are my favorites from last night.

 

After Midnight

 

This musical recreates the experience of going to a Jazz Age nightclub, and the number they performed sizzled with energy and uproarious excitement.  Some nice voices and incredible dancing, the kind of dancing that makes me salivate with jealousy.

 

Cabaret

 

Yes, I know they’ve done it before.  I know that nothing’s really changed, but come on!  Alan Cumming as the Emcee doing “Willkommen” – that’s worth revisiting any day.  His captivating, sexy performance remains one for the ages.

 

Violet

 

I’m not too familiar with the musical set in the 1960s U.S., but their song was lovely and well-sung, and you never go wrong with Sutton Foster.  She was wonderfully winning as a young facially-disfigured woman traveling across the country to meet a faith healer.  One nitpick, though – no scar!  Did Sutton just not want to mess with that makeup for Tony night, or does Violet not actually have a visible scar in the show?  What’s up with that?

 

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

 

I’ll admit to being shocked that they did “Sugar Daddy” (I would’ve bet money on “The Origin of Love” or “Wig in a Box,”) but I suppose it was maybe so Lena Hall would get to do a bit more singing.  Either way, while Neil Patrick Harris is no John Cameron Mitchell, he made for a very fun Hedwig.  This performance exploded with energy and cheekiness, and I had a blast watching Hedwig interact with the audience members.

 

A Gentlemen’s Guide to Love and Murder

 

I knew very little about this show going in, but I just adored this performance.  Excellent music and tremendous performances, acting and singing alike.  The scene was a classic farcical “man tries to hide two women from one another” setup, and it was fantastically executed with two constantly opening/closing doors and a terrific trio of performers.  Not much spectacle, but heavy emphasis on quality and talent.  More than any other, this number made me want to learn more about its show.