Spotlight on Fandoms: Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not: Hedwig.
First off, I'd like to apologize for the fact that unlike Hedwig's first diary written on a roll of toilet paper, this Spotlight isn't going to be fully-illustrated since my DVD is packed away in a box in storage. Anyway. Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a musical-turned-movie with a book/script by John Cameron Mitchell and music by Stephen Trask. It’s been compared to Rocky Horror (Picture) Show, which is accurate in a vague way: Hedwig is the story of a washed up glam-rocker from East Berlin, the victim of a botched sex-change operation (hence the Angry Inch, see). It’s twisted and irreverent, and packed with black humor.
To put it one way, Hedwig is about someone constantly reinventing himself/herself and searching for self-identity in the face of repeated setbacks and adversity - or to put it another way, it’s about someone coping with a really crappy life the only way she knows how. It’s honestly . . . a hard fandom to explain. I don’t know how to capture the humor that makes the show so awesome. The story itself isn’t all that mindblowing - it’s all in how it’s told, and I seriously can’t figure out how to capture that. Seriously, the entire stage show is like one two hour long metaquote.
I’ll be talking about both the stage productions and the film here, as they’re very different entities. I’ve got a real attachment to the stage show, since I was involved in the original L.A. production from the beginning and was part of the fanbase street team to publicize the film - but that’s a whole different story that has nothing to do with the spotlight post since it’s really personal, although I’m happy to share if you ping me on AIM or email. So, on to the LJ-cuts! (LJ-cut text shamelessly cribbed from the script.)
How did some slip of a girly-boy from Communist East Berlin become the internationally ignored song stylist barely standing before you?
The stage show, starring Mitchell as Hedwig Schmidt, Miriam Shor as Yitzhak, and Stephen Trask and his band Cheater as the members of the Angry Inch, premiered off-off-Broadway in 1998 at the 300-seat Jane Street Theatre in New York - the ballroom of the Hotel Riverview, where some of the surviving crew of the Titanic were brought. And yes, this does actually factor into the stage patter for the original NY production. (“You brave unfortunate souls, blasted by man’s hubris and washed up on cruel shores, I, who am merely blasted and washed up, salute you!")
First there was a successful (and occasionally offstage-drama-laden) New York run: John Cameron Mitchell was succeeded by Michael Cerveris, Kevin Cahoon, Donovan Leitch (the son of 70’s rocker Donovan), Ally Sheedy (I did mention offstage drama), and finally Matt McGrath before the final curtain; among the actresses who picked up the role of Yitzhak from Miriam Shor were Maggie Moore, who you may remember from The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls In Love. In those early days, there was also a Boston stage production starring Kevin Cahoon and Cory Waletzko as Hedwig and Yitzhak, and a short-lived but well-loved Los Angeles production co-produced by David Bowie, with Michael Cerveris and Miriam Shor (later Nancy Hower). In 2001, New Line Cinema picked up the film rights, there were accolades at Sundance, and Hedwig has now established a rather firm little cult film footing of its own.
Who is this Hedwig and why have we never heard of her before, Bob?
That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for years. Minus the “Bob."
Characters denoted with an asterisk (*) did not appear in the stage show, or were represented only as voices portrayed by Hedwig’s actor. Actors denoted in parentheses are from the movie; I’m not naming all the stage casts. :P
Hedwig Robinson - (John Cameron Mitchell) Our not-as-iconic-as-she’d-like-to-be title character. Neé Hansel Schmidt, Hedwig was born in East Berlin. (“When the Wall went up, we happened to be living on the East side. Mother was given a job teaching sculpture to limbless children.") Abused by his American GI father, he grew up listening to American Forces Radio - in their apartment so tiny, he had to put his head on the top rack of the oven and listen curled up on the door. Hansel became Hedwig when, after falling in love with an American soldier named Luther Robinson, agreed to a sex change operation in order to marry Luther and get out of East Germany.
The operation was botched - leaving Hedwig with “a one-inch mound of flesh with a scar running down it like a sideways grimace on an eyeless face," but it was enough to make the marriage legal and get her out. Of course, Luther abandoned Hedwig and left her living in a trailer park in Junction City, Kansas - the very same day that the Berlin Wall came down. Everything since then has been a convoluted and often futile attempt to get out of the gutter. Hedwig’s got two obsessions in life: philosophy and rock music. She (or he, at the time) got kicked out of university after delivering a lecture “on the aggressive influence of German philosophy on rock and roll: entitled You, Kant, Always Get What You Want." Plato’s Symposium factors heavily into Hedwig’s story arc and character development: she puts a lot of stock in the notion of soulmates and needing another person to be complete, as is illustrated early on in the song “The Origin of Love."
Yitzhak --(Miriam Shor) Hedwig’s “man Friday . . . through Thursday." Part roadie, part backup singer, part husband, all punching bag. You don’t get much background on Yitzhak in the film, unfortunately, so everything here comes from the stage show. Hedwig met Yitzhak in the former Yugoslavia, just before the Serbian war, doing a drag show billed as “Kristall Nacht, the Last Jewess of the Balkans." (Yeah, this show doesn’t pull punches with the twisted humor sometimes.) Mirroring Hedwig’s escape from East Berlin, Yitzhak agreed to marry Hedwig to get out of Yugoslavia before all hell broke loose, and Hedwig agreed on the condition that Yitzhak could never dress in drag again.
This makes him very, very sullen, and very resentful - but in the movie, at least, despite the frakked-up-ness of their relationship, he actually loves Hedwig, or at least cares. His dream? To be in RENT. Which he does attempt to do in the movie, trying out for the Broadway Cruises Polynesian tour production.
Tommy Gnosis (*) - (Michael Pitt, vocals by Stephen Trask) A massive, cultlike, teenaged rock star who spends most of his time offscreen in the movie and is only heard in offstage recorded snippets through a “stage door" in the stage show. Hedwig’s former lover, whom she believes is her other half, Tommy was once Tommy Speck, a “classic rock-loving, Dungeons and Dragons obsessed Jesus freak with a fish on the back of his truck," the older son of the commander of the nearby Army base where Hedwig scraped by with babysitting and blow jobs. In glam style, he wears a lot of makeup and a silver cross painted on his forehead, and his logo is a Jesus-fish with the word “GNOSIS" inside it.
Tommy has taken sole credit for all the songs he and Hedwig wrote together which shot him to stardom, which is why Hedwig is now stalking him, playing crappy run-down venues as close as possible to his big arena tour (the Bilgewater’s seafood restaurant chain, in the movie), playing the same songs, and trying to tell people the truth about those songs.
Sgt. Luther Robinson (*) - (Maurice Dean Wint) Hedwig’s ex-husband, who did the trophy-wife thing and left her for a younger, prettier . . . boy.
Phyllis Stein (*) - (Andrea Martin) Hedwig’s manager.
Skszp --(Stephen Trask) The lead guitarist/keyboardist of the Angry Inch.
Jacek -- (Theodore Liscinski III) The Angry Inch’s other guitarist.
Schlatko -- (Michael Aronov) The Angry Inch’s drummer.
Krzysztof -- (Rob Campbell) The Angry Inch’s bassist.
I laugh, because I will cry if I don’t.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch stage script. So much of the show was ad-libbed on a nightly basis, and customized based on the city/venue, that you really can’t capture a 100% accurate script. But the entire storyline as told on stage, as well as all the lyrics and a good portion of the dark humor, is here.
Rainbow Carnage -- The official website of the Los Angeles midnight screening shadow cast.
A clip from the promotional video recording that was done for the original off-Broadway production.
Michael Cerveris performing “Wicked Little Town" live at the Jane Street Theatre. Bootlegged video file, so the quality’s crappy, but Michael Cerveris was my Hedwig in the original L.A. production and I love him dearly.
Anthony Rapp performing “The Origin of Love". untouchableskin, this one’s for you.
"Wig in a Box" as performed by They Might Be Giants, starring puppets. Just for nadiathesaint.
And now, a few YouTube clips from the movie:
"Tear Me Down -- Intro sequence.
"The Origin of Love" -- Contains some cartoon nudity, so watch at your discretion.
"Angry Inch" -- Explicit lyrics warning is in effect here.
"Wig in a Box" -- Contains . . . fake breasts on an apron.
"Sugar Daddy"
"Breathe through my mouth." Not a musical number; a Hedwig/Tommy scene from the second half of the film.
"Hedwig’s Lament
"Wicked Little Town" (Tommy Gnosis version)
"Midnight Radio -- End of the movie, so will contain spoilers.
A drunken Tommy Gnosis and Hedwig singing their way to a scandalous limo accident.
There’s actually a total bonanza of Hedwig videos available on YouTube, if you just search “Hedwig and the Angry Inch."
Where can you get it?
Well, if you keep an eye on the Sundance Channel and IFC, they like to run the movie a lot, and now that the rights are available there are amateur stage productions going on everywhere if you keep an eye out for them.
If you're interested in finding out more about the original New York, Boston, or Los Angeles productions . . . *eyeshift* Email me. As for picking up the movie on DVD . . . well, you can always rent it, or if you want to buy it I’d suggest jumping on that while you can as it seems to be out of print.
And that, folks, is that.
First off, I'd like to apologize for the fact that unlike Hedwig's first diary written on a roll of toilet paper, this Spotlight isn't going to be fully-illustrated since my DVD is packed away in a box in storage. Anyway. Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a musical-turned-movie with a book/script by John Cameron Mitchell and music by Stephen Trask. It’s been compared to Rocky Horror (Picture) Show, which is accurate in a vague way: Hedwig is the story of a washed up glam-rocker from East Berlin, the victim of a botched sex-change operation (hence the Angry Inch, see). It’s twisted and irreverent, and packed with black humor.
To put it one way, Hedwig is about someone constantly reinventing himself/herself and searching for self-identity in the face of repeated setbacks and adversity - or to put it another way, it’s about someone coping with a really crappy life the only way she knows how. It’s honestly . . . a hard fandom to explain. I don’t know how to capture the humor that makes the show so awesome. The story itself isn’t all that mindblowing - it’s all in how it’s told, and I seriously can’t figure out how to capture that. Seriously, the entire stage show is like one two hour long metaquote.
I’ll be talking about both the stage productions and the film here, as they’re very different entities. I’ve got a real attachment to the stage show, since I was involved in the original L.A. production from the beginning and was part of the fanbase street team to publicize the film - but that’s a whole different story that has nothing to do with the spotlight post since it’s really personal, although I’m happy to share if you ping me on AIM or email. So, on to the LJ-cuts! (LJ-cut text shamelessly cribbed from the script.)
How did some slip of a girly-boy from Communist East Berlin become the internationally ignored song stylist barely standing before you?
The stage show, starring Mitchell as Hedwig Schmidt, Miriam Shor as Yitzhak, and Stephen Trask and his band Cheater as the members of the Angry Inch, premiered off-off-Broadway in 1998 at the 300-seat Jane Street Theatre in New York - the ballroom of the Hotel Riverview, where some of the surviving crew of the Titanic were brought. And yes, this does actually factor into the stage patter for the original NY production. (“You brave unfortunate souls, blasted by man’s hubris and washed up on cruel shores, I, who am merely blasted and washed up, salute you!")
First there was a successful (and occasionally offstage-drama-laden) New York run: John Cameron Mitchell was succeeded by Michael Cerveris, Kevin Cahoon, Donovan Leitch (the son of 70’s rocker Donovan), Ally Sheedy (I did mention offstage drama), and finally Matt McGrath before the final curtain; among the actresses who picked up the role of Yitzhak from Miriam Shor were Maggie Moore, who you may remember from The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls In Love. In those early days, there was also a Boston stage production starring Kevin Cahoon and Cory Waletzko as Hedwig and Yitzhak, and a short-lived but well-loved Los Angeles production co-produced by David Bowie, with Michael Cerveris and Miriam Shor (later Nancy Hower). In 2001, New Line Cinema picked up the film rights, there were accolades at Sundance, and Hedwig has now established a rather firm little cult film footing of its own.
Who is this Hedwig and why have we never heard of her before, Bob?
That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for years. Minus the “Bob."
Characters denoted with an asterisk (*) did not appear in the stage show, or were represented only as voices portrayed by Hedwig’s actor. Actors denoted in parentheses are from the movie; I’m not naming all the stage casts. :P
Hedwig Robinson - (John Cameron Mitchell) Our not-as-iconic-as-she’d-like-to-be title character. Neé Hansel Schmidt, Hedwig was born in East Berlin. (“When the Wall went up, we happened to be living on the East side. Mother was given a job teaching sculpture to limbless children.") Abused by his American GI father, he grew up listening to American Forces Radio - in their apartment so tiny, he had to put his head on the top rack of the oven and listen curled up on the door. Hansel became Hedwig when, after falling in love with an American soldier named Luther Robinson, agreed to a sex change operation in order to marry Luther and get out of East Germany.
The operation was botched - leaving Hedwig with “a one-inch mound of flesh with a scar running down it like a sideways grimace on an eyeless face," but it was enough to make the marriage legal and get her out. Of course, Luther abandoned Hedwig and left her living in a trailer park in Junction City, Kansas - the very same day that the Berlin Wall came down. Everything since then has been a convoluted and often futile attempt to get out of the gutter. Hedwig’s got two obsessions in life: philosophy and rock music. She (or he, at the time) got kicked out of university after delivering a lecture “on the aggressive influence of German philosophy on rock and roll: entitled You, Kant, Always Get What You Want." Plato’s Symposium factors heavily into Hedwig’s story arc and character development: she puts a lot of stock in the notion of soulmates and needing another person to be complete, as is illustrated early on in the song “The Origin of Love."
Yitzhak --(Miriam Shor) Hedwig’s “man Friday . . . through Thursday." Part roadie, part backup singer, part husband, all punching bag. You don’t get much background on Yitzhak in the film, unfortunately, so everything here comes from the stage show. Hedwig met Yitzhak in the former Yugoslavia, just before the Serbian war, doing a drag show billed as “Kristall Nacht, the Last Jewess of the Balkans." (Yeah, this show doesn’t pull punches with the twisted humor sometimes.) Mirroring Hedwig’s escape from East Berlin, Yitzhak agreed to marry Hedwig to get out of Yugoslavia before all hell broke loose, and Hedwig agreed on the condition that Yitzhak could never dress in drag again.
This makes him very, very sullen, and very resentful - but in the movie, at least, despite the frakked-up-ness of their relationship, he actually loves Hedwig, or at least cares. His dream? To be in RENT. Which he does attempt to do in the movie, trying out for the Broadway Cruises Polynesian tour production.
Tommy Gnosis (*) - (Michael Pitt, vocals by Stephen Trask) A massive, cultlike, teenaged rock star who spends most of his time offscreen in the movie and is only heard in offstage recorded snippets through a “stage door" in the stage show. Hedwig’s former lover, whom she believes is her other half, Tommy was once Tommy Speck, a “classic rock-loving, Dungeons and Dragons obsessed Jesus freak with a fish on the back of his truck," the older son of the commander of the nearby Army base where Hedwig scraped by with babysitting and blow jobs. In glam style, he wears a lot of makeup and a silver cross painted on his forehead, and his logo is a Jesus-fish with the word “GNOSIS" inside it.
Tommy has taken sole credit for all the songs he and Hedwig wrote together which shot him to stardom, which is why Hedwig is now stalking him, playing crappy run-down venues as close as possible to his big arena tour (the Bilgewater’s seafood restaurant chain, in the movie), playing the same songs, and trying to tell people the truth about those songs.
Sgt. Luther Robinson (*) - (Maurice Dean Wint) Hedwig’s ex-husband, who did the trophy-wife thing and left her for a younger, prettier . . . boy.
Phyllis Stein (*) - (Andrea Martin) Hedwig’s manager.
Skszp --(Stephen Trask) The lead guitarist/keyboardist of the Angry Inch.
Jacek -- (Theodore Liscinski III) The Angry Inch’s other guitarist.
Schlatko -- (Michael Aronov) The Angry Inch’s drummer.
Krzysztof -- (Rob Campbell) The Angry Inch’s bassist.
I laugh, because I will cry if I don’t.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch stage script. So much of the show was ad-libbed on a nightly basis, and customized based on the city/venue, that you really can’t capture a 100% accurate script. But the entire storyline as told on stage, as well as all the lyrics and a good portion of the dark humor, is here.
Rainbow Carnage -- The official website of the Los Angeles midnight screening shadow cast.
A clip from the promotional video recording that was done for the original off-Broadway production.
Michael Cerveris performing “Wicked Little Town" live at the Jane Street Theatre. Bootlegged video file, so the quality’s crappy, but Michael Cerveris was my Hedwig in the original L.A. production and I love him dearly.
Anthony Rapp performing “The Origin of Love". untouchableskin, this one’s for you.
"Wig in a Box" as performed by They Might Be Giants, starring puppets. Just for nadiathesaint.
And now, a few YouTube clips from the movie:
"Tear Me Down -- Intro sequence.
"The Origin of Love" -- Contains some cartoon nudity, so watch at your discretion.
"Angry Inch" -- Explicit lyrics warning is in effect here.
"Wig in a Box" -- Contains . . . fake breasts on an apron.
"Sugar Daddy"
"Breathe through my mouth." Not a musical number; a Hedwig/Tommy scene from the second half of the film.
"Hedwig’s Lament
"Wicked Little Town" (Tommy Gnosis version)
"Midnight Radio -- End of the movie, so will contain spoilers.
A drunken Tommy Gnosis and Hedwig singing their way to a scandalous limo accident.
There’s actually a total bonanza of Hedwig videos available on YouTube, if you just search “Hedwig and the Angry Inch."
Where can you get it?
Well, if you keep an eye on the Sundance Channel and IFC, they like to run the movie a lot, and now that the rights are available there are amateur stage productions going on everywhere if you keep an eye out for them.
If you're interested in finding out more about the original New York, Boston, or Los Angeles productions . . . *eyeshift* Email me. As for picking up the movie on DVD . . . well, you can always rent it, or if you want to buy it I’d suggest jumping on that while you can as it seems to be out of print.
And that, folks, is that.