Well, yes. After opening in the West Village's Jane Street Theater nearly a year ago, Hedwig became one of the year's most talked-about productions. In addition to winning over New York hipsters who thought Rent was about as rock & roll as Pat Boone, Hedwig caught the attention of the rock elite and the Hollywood mafia. Now that everyone from Madonna to Danny DeVito has signed its guest roster, it's obvious that Hedwig and the Angry Inch has been "watched" enough already.

But Hedwig and the Angry Inch-the most kick-ass make-believe band to rock talk shows and concert halls since Spinal Tap-is another story. On February 9, the phenomenon that composer-lyricist Stephen Trask half-jokingly refers to as "the globalization of Hedwig" will kick into high gear when Atlantic Records releases the play's cast album...if that's what you want to call it. Produced by the indie-rock luminary Brad Wood, Hedwig and the Angry Inch could be the first cast recording to get a video played on 120 Minutes and the first to spawn a hit single since Chess took "One Night in Bangkok" to No.3 in 1985.

"This whole album thing is exciting and wierd to me," says Mitchell over lunch on December afternoon at Cafe de Bruxelles. "I have this image of us playing on American Bandstand or something. It's really funny." Despite his self-mocking humor, the 35-year old Broadway veteran is in touch with his inner diva. he politely sends back his glass of water (not clean) and soon does the same with the orange juice he ordered (tastes funny). Clearly, this is a man who knows what he wants. "I did Big River, and I kept trying to change the melodies," he says in an alarmingly serene voice. "The conductor kept telling me, 'You can't do that, because that note's repeated by the oboe.'" He laughs. "I love formalism, but I wanted something that allowed me to start with parameters and smash through them if I felt like it that night."

A decade later, Mitchell found exactly what he was looking for in the chatracter of Hedwig, a fourth wall-smashing, German rock & roll goddess who also happens to be the vicitm of a gruesomely botched sex-change operation. Born in 1994, Hedwig debuted at Squeezebox, the Friday-night party at Don Hill's where Trask and his longtime band Cheater (its member double as the Angry Inch) backed up drag queens who'd tired of the usual lip-synch routines. Since then, incarnations of the play have been mounted at spots like Fez, the Westbeth Theatre and even Fire Island. But it wasn't until Mitchell and Trask stepped into the Jane Street Theater, a grandly dilapidated auditorium on the first floor of the Hotel Riverview, that they found a home suitable for their self-proclaimed "internationally ignored song stylist."

Despite the play's accumulated praise, Mitchell insists that it's not exactly a runaway hit. "It hasn't been a wild success in terms of

Born in Cold War-era East Berlin, Hedwig is seduced by a shady American GI named Luther (in the hickory-smoked twang of "Sugar Daddy"), who promises to take the boy to the States on the condition that "he" become a "she" (in the Coney Island thrash of "Angry Inch"). Left with only a "one-inch mound of flesh" between her legs. Hedwig is dumped and takes up residency in a Kansas City trailer park (in the winsome girl-group melodies of "Wig in a Box"). She befriends Tommy Speck, a clumsy teenage kid whom she renames Tommy gnosis--the Greek word for "knowledge"--only to be dumped, once again, on Tommy's way to the top (in the indie-pop readymade "Long Grift"). That leaves Hedwig to preach the redeeming powers of rock & roll (in the Ziggy Stardust-like finale "Midnight Radio") to the folks at the Hotel Riverview, while Tommy rocks a sold-out crowd across the Hudson at the meadowlands.

Although the album is filled with potential singles, the question remains: How do you take a rock musical centered on a fictitious entity who straddles that great divide between man and woman, and sell it to the masses? If you're Trask and Mitchell, crossing over means loosening your grip on a brainchild you've raised largely by yourself; at the very least, it means forgetting about the Jane Street Theater. "We're totally downplaying the theater aspect for the radio," says Vicky Germaise, senior VP of marketing at Atlantic. "That would just give them another excuse not to play it."

To further distinguish the album from the show, Hedwig features a new song, "Random Number Generation"--a Hole-ish rave-up sung by actress Miriam Shor, who plays Hedwig's boyfriend Yitzak. And inspired by Please Kill Me, Legs McNeil's oral history of the '70's downtown punk explosion, Trask snagged veteran scenester Danny Fields to write an essay for the liner notes. "He's entering our world," Trask says with a fat grin over breakfast at Pamela's. "Sort of like when real people go on sitcoms and play themselves."

Whereas Mitchell is a self-composed man of the theater, Trask, 33, is the quintessential rock & roll dreamer; hyperactive and clumsy, he gives you the sense he's got 10,000 thoughts ping-ponging in his head and not a clue as to which will come out first. An avowed Prince fanatic who once gigged with Joan Osborne before she went multiplatinum, Trask has waited years to get to this point. naturally, he's taken the album project under his wing.


On to Part 2