SHE MAKES HER ENTRANCE like a star dying to be born - goose-stepping throught the audience with the arrogant aplomb of Marlene Deitrich and Jim Morrison; decked out like a trailer-park tart's idea of a glam-rock fox, in stone-washed denim, an Aryan-yellow, blow-dried mane and red-glitter lipstick; accompanied by the refried-Queen strains of "America the Beautiful" and a marvelously surly introduction by her crusty Serbian valet boy toy, Yitzak: "Ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not - Hedwig!"
Then the former Hansel Schmidt-now Hedwig, a Yankee Doodle dahling of muddled gender, thanks to a botched 1988 sex-change operation in her native East Berlin - takes the stage and dares you not to accept her as your new, true rock & roll queen. "I was born on the other side/Of a town ripped in two," she belts through the power-chord fireworks and girl-group whoops of her opening number, "Tear Me Down." "I made it over the great divide/Now I'm coming for you."
For ninety minutes, backed by her sullen but kick-butt band, the Angry Inch, Hedwig presses her case for coronation, telling her life story in pun and song like a way-off-Broadway hybrid of Sandra Bernhard, Nina Hagen and Courtney Love. Hedwig relates in hilarious detail a grim socialist childhood (listening to armed-forces radio, head in the oven for privacy); her predatoy seduction by an American GI and a messy switch from he to sort-of she ("Six inches forward and five inches back/I got an angry inch"); the working life of a transsexual divorcee in Junction City, Kansas ("the jobs we call blow"); and love and collaboration with a teenage dork maned Tommy Speck, whom she remakes as rock god Tommy Gnosis only to be betrayed and ditched as he goes big time.
And there are the tunes: an LP's worth of oughta-be hitsville, including the sweet-and-sour, Lou Reed-style melancholy of "The Origin of Love," the buoyant personal-makeover march "Wig in a Box" (Meat Loaf meets the Shirelles) and the raw-power discontent of "Exquisite Corpse," Hedwig's climactic rebellion against her physical and emotional mutilation. When she brings the night to a close with "Midnight Radio," a luminous tribute to the healing powers of rock & roll, Hedwig hits the pop-operatic heights of David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust aria, "Rock & Roll Suicide" -but with the emphasis on survival. As she declares in the middle of the song, saluting her heroines and inspirations, "Here's to Patti and Tina and Yoko/Aretha and Nona and Nico/And me."
IT IS AN EVENING OF spirit, wit and crunch worthy of Madison Square Garden - that is, if there really were a Hedwig. She is actually a brilliant work of fiction, the creation of actor-writer John Cameron Mitchell and composer-lyricist Stephen Trask, and she is the centerpiece of their dynamite one-act theatre piece, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Since opening last Valentine's Day at the tiny Jane Street Theater in lower Manhattan, Hedwig - with Mitchell in kinetic drag as Hedwig; Trask and his real-life band, Cheater, as the Angry Inch; and Miriam Shor in reverse drag as the grumpy Yitzak - has been getting rave reviews and playing to ecstatic houses. An original-cast album is due shortly on Atlantic Records, and Mitchell and Trask have signed with New Line Cinema to put Hedwig on the big screen.
All this good fortune is for good reason, too. In the whole long, sorry history of rock musicals, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is the first one that truly rocks.
"It's really gratifying to see young punks and people who are more staid all enjoying it at the same time," says Mitchell, 35, whose audiences this year have included bona fide rock stars like Lou Reed, David Bowie, Pete Townshend and former Hüsker Dü singer-guitarist Bob Mould. "The older people think, 'Oh, I didn't know rock & roll could be intelligent.' And the kids say, 'I didn't think theater could rock & roll.'"
"What amazes me is that a theater critic will talk about the blocking of a scene," says Trask, 32, "and a
rock critic will notice La Vern Baker [the great R&B songstress gets a name check in "Wig in a Box"]. But the overall effect seems to be the same on everybody. Rock people like myself - we like the idea of theater and rock & roll mixing together. Young actors who are professional and sing in musicals are saying, 'I can't believe someone did this.'"
And, Trask notes, "for under-fourty gay men who grew up with rock rather than Marilyn Monroe, it's exciting to know that this comes from your culture."
As a rock musical, Hedwig was born a million miles away from the Broadway sugar of Rent and Tommy - as part of a female-impersonator revue at Squeezebox, a club on Greenwich Street where Mitchell, an on- and off-Broadway veteran and a regular on the short-lived sitcom Party Girl, debuted as Hedwig in 1994. At Squeezebox, Trask was the house-band leader and the specialty was rock-goddess drag - Tina Turner, Patti Smith, Deborah Harry - instead of stereotypical Barbra Steisand and Judy Garland routines. Mitchell's brassy, gender-bent invention fit right in. His early Hedwig repertoire was a bold mix of covers: "Half-Breed," by Cher, Television's "See No Evil," Yoko Ono's "Death of Samantha," and "Non-Alignment Pact," by Pere Ubu.
At Squeezebox and later in other downtown clubs and theater spaces, Mitchel, Trask and Cheater - guitarist Chris Weilding, bassist Scott Bilbrey and drummer Dave McKinley - developed Hedwig's diva potential. Mitchell wrote a story rife with double-entendres and rock-biz jokes ("We're talking to Phil Collins' people, but then again, aren't we all?"). His script was also grounded in autobiography: Hedwig is based on a German émigré and prostitute, Helga, who had been a babysitter for Mitchell's family in Junction City. And like Tommy Speck/Gnosis, Mitchell was an Army general's son with a strict Catholic upbringing.
Equally versed in Cole Porter and the Pixies, Trask - Connecticut-born, with a background in modern dance and movie scoring - wrote new songs that literally amplified Mitchell's themes of sexual confusion and identity crisis, "Exquisite Corpse" was, Trask says, his idea of Hedwig doing "a Sleater-Kinney or Courtney Love kind of song." "The Origin of Love" was inspired by Mitchell's idea for a song based on the concept in Plato's Symposium of love as the eternal pursuit of a missing half, that physical or emotional component without which one feels incomplete, less than whole.
Michael Cerveris, who was the original lead in the Broadway Tommy and who recently played Hedwig for a month while Mitchell took a summer break, says that amid the gags and riffs, Hedwig "totally gets your guard down and sucker-punches you with this story - that search for your other half, whatever or whoever that is. And also that feeling of not fitting in, of being the odd person out."
Yet, Cerveris adds, "as fucked up as she is and as tragic as she is, Hedwig is totally a survivor. And even though she comes in as this kind of monster, it's not a monster you don't know in yourself."
Surprisingly slender and soft-spoken when he's not in costume, Mitchell admits that Hedwig is, in part, "a big 'fuck you' to a lot of people who were dictating what theater should be. Though I don't think of this as any kind of gay tract. I really want as many people as possible to relate to something, without compromising or dumbing down. I've always liked a good joke that everybody can laugh at."