Hedwig and the Angry Inch
You guys, I saw Darren Criss in Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Wednesday night. Short version: the show was fantastic and Darren was brilliant -- mesmerizing, even, as at least one reviewer has said.
I hadn't seen the show before; I'd seen the movie, and this production was both much better and more to my personal taste than the movie: I love the theatricality of the production, the way it's framed as a monologue with Hedwig doing most of the roles (rather than the movie where different characters are played by different actors). I'm still kind of reeling, honestly. Darren was -- wow. Just wow. He completely disappeared into the role of Hedwig; even his voice sounded different than it does on his own songs or on Glee (which aren't that different from each other; he was clearly making an effort here, though it didn't sound like an effort). Watching him shift between Hedwig and Tommy was especially astonishing: not just accent but pitch, posture, gestures, facial expressions... I mean, I've seen the videos where he shifts from Darren to Blaine and back, so I knew he could do this kind of thing, but this was on another level altogether, and of course there's something different and wonderful about seeing it live.
The key line of the show, for me, is -- and I'm probably paraphrasing here rather than remembering the exact wording -- "I laugh because I'll cry if I don't," and what I loved most about Darren's performance is that he nailed just how important -- and fragile -- that choice is. This is a story about using self-deprecation and camp and dirty jokes and cruelty as ways of coping with torture, betrayal, rejection, regret. The beginning of the show was so performative: so much bravado, so much mugging for the audience and encouraging applause. But over the course of the show, the façade breaks down, Hedwig herself breaks down: she becomes less in control of her emotions and the audience -- and simultaneously starts to realize that maybe those ways of coping don't work, that they're more damaging than they're worth. In this performance, that breakdown was utterly wrenching. The ending -- the literal and emotional stripping down, the exhortation to "lift up your hands," the walk into the huge hot lights revealed upstage when the back of the set opens up -- all these things suggest some sort of redemption or resolution, but it's not actually clear what kind; it's not clear how Hedwig goes forward from that moment.
Part of what Darren brings to the role is a fascinating combination of naturalism and camp. He's great at the parts of the role that require playing directly to the audience; in a way he's almost too good at it, because his effortless connection with the audience makes it difficult to understand how Hedwig isn't a star. (In the movie it's perfectly clear, and the answer isn't just about Middle America being unready for a trans rock star: JCM's Hedwig is brittle, abrasive, detached, almost contemptuous of the audience; it's hard to look away from her, but it's equally hard to imagine being a fan of her.) Darren is great at the self-satirizing, but there's a perceptible distinction between the jokes that are delivered as jokes and the jokes that seem entirely off-the-cuff (even though I recognized enough of them from the movie to know that they're not improv; they're scripted, and carefully so).
Darren also brings a truly fantastic rock 'n' roll plausibility to the role -- not just the punk energy of JCM's Hedwig but a sense of music as self-expression. Darren's Hedwig is unquestionably self-aware about performance -- the conceit is that we're at a concert, after all -- but during the songs themselves Hedwig disappears into the music; there's a sense that the music is the one thing holding her together, the one point of continuity between past and present. Darren doesn't have a Broadway voice, but he does have an excellent and expressive pop voice, and in a show like this, where everyone's on mics, his limitations were not liabilities.
I should probably say here that for me the show is fundamentally about music -- at least as much as it's about gender identity or sexual orientation. I mean, obviously gender and sexuality matter in the show; Hansel is a gay man who's tormented into having a sex change operation as the price of leaving a miserable situation; it's not something Hansel wants, not a choice he makes freely. The operation is Luther's decision, and it's an expression of Luther's homophobia. Hedwig makes the best of a horrific situation -- the botched operation, the new passport -- but hasn't chosen any part of it. And in that sense it's about gender and the performance of gender; it's about how gender is something learned, something acquired and put on: the ultimate wig in a box. But for me, the show is about the ways in which music offers escape and consolation and catharsis to people who feel like freaks or are treated like freaks.
Overall, it was an amazing performance and an amazing show; I was there for Darren, but I actually kept forgetting it was Darren onstage because the story was so compelling and immersive. During the curtain call he was recognizably Darren again; I was close enough to the stage to see what he was saying, even though he wasn't audible: "Thank you! Thank you so much. Thank you for coming; thank you for coming back." Gesturing to the band: "Give it up for these motherfuckers!" And then special acknowledgements and blown kisses to the people he'd licked and spit on and otherwise gotten up close and personal with over the course of the show.
I bought a poster afterwards and went to hang out by the stage door to get it signed -- except there were literally hundreds of other people there, mostly twentysomething girls and gay boys, a few of us in our thirties and forties, plus a great many teens and tweens escorted by variously tolerant, bewildered, and begrudging parents. It was pretty clear that nothing was going to happen for a while, so I strolled down 44th to Shake Shack for some ice cream and then wandered back to the Belasco, from whence Darren still hadn't emerged.
Some of the parents were getting pretty agitated at that point, and a few decamped with their kids before Darren ever came out. Several more dragged their kids away after he came out when it became clear they weren't going to get an autograph right away: "We've been standing here longer than we were in the theatre!" said one angry father as he hauled away two weeping girls who looked maybe fourteen.
I was in no rush, so I hung out at the back of the crowd as it gradually thinned, listening to a group of women in their late forties, one of whom had a young teenager who's a huge Darren fan; the kid was up at the front, right behind the barrier, and the women were talking loudly and with obvious confusion about the show, which they clearly hadn't followed or understood, and trading misinformation about Glee and about Darren's career, which I wanted to correct but didn't because sometimes I have manners. Instead I pulled my Kindle out of my bag and read Glee fic like a civilized person.
I stuck it out, and eventually I was able to hand over my poster and smile at Darren and say "Thanks for an awesome show." "Thanks for waiting," he said, smiling back -- and, okay, one of the most astonishing and appealing things about Darren as a live performer, which I knew from having seen him in concert, is that he has the magical and somewhat disconcerting ability to make pretty much every person in an entire roomful of people feel like he is connecting very specifically and specially with them, and that quality is magnified to an alarming degree when you're standing less than six feet away from him. It is a little overwhelming, and I mean that in the best possible way.
He was out there for well over an hour signing things and chatting and generally being sweet and attentive; he wasn't done when I left (though he was getting close, at least). He's a fanboy himself, of course, so he gets it, but wow, I was impressed. Also worth noting: the security personnel, who had clearly had it up to here with herding hundreds of fans, looked like they were having the worst day ever and were ready to murder us all on principle -- but as soon as Darren came out they were smiling, one of them a little reluctantly but completely genuinely. It's clear that everybody at that theatre just likes him -- which doesn't surprise me, based on what I've seen castmates and crew say about him, but it was really something to see angry and frustrated people just start helplessly smiling as soon as he showed up.
So that was that, and it was totally worth all the chaos and stress and expense. Hurrah for demented fangirl enthusiasms!
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
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I hadn't seen the show before; I'd seen the movie, and this production was both much better and more to my personal taste than the movie: I love the theatricality of the production, the way it's framed as a monologue with Hedwig doing most of the roles (rather than the movie where different characters are played by different actors). I'm still kind of reeling, honestly. Darren was -- wow. Just wow. He completely disappeared into the role of Hedwig; even his voice sounded different than it does on his own songs or on Glee (which aren't that different from each other; he was clearly making an effort here, though it didn't sound like an effort). Watching him shift between Hedwig and Tommy was especially astonishing: not just accent but pitch, posture, gestures, facial expressions... I mean, I've seen the videos where he shifts from Darren to Blaine and back, so I knew he could do this kind of thing, but this was on another level altogether, and of course there's something different and wonderful about seeing it live.
The key line of the show, for me, is -- and I'm probably paraphrasing here rather than remembering the exact wording -- "I laugh because I'll cry if I don't," and what I loved most about Darren's performance is that he nailed just how important -- and fragile -- that choice is. This is a story about using self-deprecation and camp and dirty jokes and cruelty as ways of coping with torture, betrayal, rejection, regret. The beginning of the show was so performative: so much bravado, so much mugging for the audience and encouraging applause. But over the course of the show, the façade breaks down, Hedwig herself breaks down: she becomes less in control of her emotions and the audience -- and simultaneously starts to realize that maybe those ways of coping don't work, that they're more damaging than they're worth. In this performance, that breakdown was utterly wrenching. The ending -- the literal and emotional stripping down, the exhortation to "lift up your hands," the walk into the huge hot lights revealed upstage when the back of the set opens up -- all these things suggest some sort of redemption or resolution, but it's not actually clear what kind; it's not clear how Hedwig goes forward from that moment.
Part of what Darren brings to the role is a fascinating combination of naturalism and camp. He's great at the parts of the role that require playing directly to the audience; in a way he's almost too good at it, because his effortless connection with the audience makes it difficult to understand how Hedwig isn't a star. (In the movie it's perfectly clear, and the answer isn't just about Middle America being unready for a trans rock star: JCM's Hedwig is brittle, abrasive, detached, almost contemptuous of the audience; it's hard to look away from her, but it's equally hard to imagine being a fan of her.) Darren is great at the self-satirizing, but there's a perceptible distinction between the jokes that are delivered as jokes and the jokes that seem entirely off-the-cuff (even though I recognized enough of them from the movie to know that they're not improv; they're scripted, and carefully so).
Darren also brings a truly fantastic rock 'n' roll plausibility to the role -- not just the punk energy of JCM's Hedwig but a sense of music as self-expression. Darren's Hedwig is unquestionably self-aware about performance -- the conceit is that we're at a concert, after all -- but during the songs themselves Hedwig disappears into the music; there's a sense that the music is the one thing holding her together, the one point of continuity between past and present. Darren doesn't have a Broadway voice, but he does have an excellent and expressive pop voice, and in a show like this, where everyone's on mics, his limitations were not liabilities.
I should probably say here that for me the show is fundamentally about music -- at least as much as it's about gender identity or sexual orientation. I mean, obviously gender and sexuality matter in the show; Hansel is a gay man who's tormented into having a sex change operation as the price of leaving a miserable situation; it's not something Hansel wants, not a choice he makes freely. The operation is Luther's decision, and it's an expression of Luther's homophobia. Hedwig makes the best of a horrific situation -- the botched operation, the new passport -- but hasn't chosen any part of it. And in that sense it's about gender and the performance of gender; it's about how gender is something learned, something acquired and put on: the ultimate wig in a box. But for me, the show is about the ways in which music offers escape and consolation and catharsis to people who feel like freaks or are treated like freaks.
Overall, it was an amazing performance and an amazing show; I was there for Darren, but I actually kept forgetting it was Darren onstage because the story was so compelling and immersive. During the curtain call he was recognizably Darren again; I was close enough to the stage to see what he was saying, even though he wasn't audible: "Thank you! Thank you so much. Thank you for coming; thank you for coming back." Gesturing to the band: "Give it up for these motherfuckers!" And then special acknowledgements and blown kisses to the people he'd licked and spit on and otherwise gotten up close and personal with over the course of the show.
I bought a poster afterwards and went to hang out by the stage door to get it signed -- except there were literally hundreds of other people there, mostly twentysomething girls and gay boys, a few of us in our thirties and forties, plus a great many teens and tweens escorted by variously tolerant, bewildered, and begrudging parents. It was pretty clear that nothing was going to happen for a while, so I strolled down 44th to Shake Shack for some ice cream and then wandered back to the Belasco, from whence Darren still hadn't emerged.
Some of the parents were getting pretty agitated at that point, and a few decamped with their kids before Darren ever came out. Several more dragged their kids away after he came out when it became clear they weren't going to get an autograph right away: "We've been standing here longer than we were in the theatre!" said one angry father as he hauled away two weeping girls who looked maybe fourteen.
I was in no rush, so I hung out at the back of the crowd as it gradually thinned, listening to a group of women in their late forties, one of whom had a young teenager who's a huge Darren fan; the kid was up at the front, right behind the barrier, and the women were talking loudly and with obvious confusion about the show, which they clearly hadn't followed or understood, and trading misinformation about Glee and about Darren's career, which I wanted to correct but didn't because sometimes I have manners. Instead I pulled my Kindle out of my bag and read Glee fic like a civilized person.
I stuck it out, and eventually I was able to hand over my poster and smile at Darren and say "Thanks for an awesome show." "Thanks for waiting," he said, smiling back -- and, okay, one of the most astonishing and appealing things about Darren as a live performer, which I knew from having seen him in concert, is that he has the magical and somewhat disconcerting ability to make pretty much every person in an entire roomful of people feel like he is connecting very specifically and specially with them, and that quality is magnified to an alarming degree when you're standing less than six feet away from him. It is a little overwhelming, and I mean that in the best possible way.
He was out there for well over an hour signing things and chatting and generally being sweet and attentive; he wasn't done when I left (though he was getting close, at least). He's a fanboy himself, of course, so he gets it, but wow, I was impressed. Also worth noting: the security personnel, who had clearly had it up to here with herding hundreds of fans, looked like they were having the worst day ever and were ready to murder us all on principle -- but as soon as Darren came out they were smiling, one of them a little reluctantly but completely genuinely. It's clear that everybody at that theatre just likes him -- which doesn't surprise me, based on what I've seen castmates and crew say about him, but it was really something to see angry and frustrated people just start helplessly smiling as soon as he showed up.
So that was that, and it was totally worth all the chaos and stress and expense. Hurrah for demented fangirl enthusiasms!
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth