Frontmezzjunkies reports: John Cameron Mitchell brings Hedwig back on the road with music, memory, and that iconic voice
By Ross
“Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” both the stage show and the film, has always lived and sung somewhere inside my soul for decades. I first encountered it in 1998, tucked inside the ramshackle Jane Street Theatre in a very different New York. The space was a gloriously rundown room inside the old Jane Street Hotel that felt like the kind of place where a genderqueer East Berlin rock singer might actually take the stage to tell her life story. And when John Cameron Mitchell stormed that ramshackle stage in that gravity-defying blond wig, launching Hedwig vividly into “Tear Me Down,” it felt like theatrical lightning had struck deep inside my core. Hedwig wasn’t just another downtown musical. It was glam rock confession, queer mythology, and punk theatre rolled into one battered pair of platform boots. And I loved it, time and time again.
So the news that Mitchell is embarking on a North American tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of the 2001 “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” film feels like the return of an old, messy friend, one I’ve never quite been able to let go of.
Beginning June 14 in Orlando, Mitchell will take the film across North America, stopping in cities including Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, Vancouver, Montreal, Los Angeles, and Toronto. Each stop on the tour will feature a 4K screening of the film, followed by an on-stage conversation with Mitchell, a lively audience Q&A, and an intimate acoustic performance of songs from the show. Fans are even encouraged to arrive in full Hedwig regalia for a pre-show costume contest, with prizes from The Criterion Collection and The Punk Rock Museum.
Over the years, I would see the show again and again. In New York and Toronto. I even traveled to Philadelphia once simply to catch another production. When it finally arrived on Broadway in 2014 at the Belasco Theatre, I watched Neil Patrick Harris step into Hedwig’s heels with a performance that won him a Tony Award. I was blown away by his embodiment, especially the time he did the car wash at the Tony Awards. And then came Mitchell himself, returning to reclaim the wig-crown he created long ago. I couldn’t have been more thrilled to be there for it.
The songs by Stephen Trask have a way of burrowing under your skin. “Midnight Radio,” “Wicked Little Town,” and especially “The Origin of Love,” with its poetic meditation on soulmates drawn from Plato’s Symposium, left us all exhilarated and strangely moved. Hedwig’s search for her missing half felt universal, even as the character herself seemed defiantly singular.
Part of that may be because the show itself feels like a living thing. It began as a scrappy downtown rock musical in 1998, won an Obie and an Outer Critics Circle Award, became a cult film in 2001, and later transformed into a Broadway sensation, welcoming performers like Taye Diggs into Hedwig’s battered glam universe. Now, twenty-five years after the film first exploded onto screens, Mitchell is inviting audiences back into Hedwig’s glamorously battered world once again, and we greet it with glee.
For those of us who have been following Hedwig’s strange and beautiful journey since she first graced the stage of the legendary Rock and Roll Fag Bar in NYC’s Village, the tour feels a bit like returning to a favourite old record playing scratchily somewhere in the back of a double-wide trailer. Trask’s music is all there, alive and breathing. The attitude is there. And the wounded, hilarious, searching heart of Hedwig Robinson still beats beneath that platinum wig.
If I’m lucky, I may even get to see it one more time when the tour stops at Toronto’s Danforth Music Hall on June 28. Because if Hedwig has taught us anything over the years, it’s this: when the music starts, and the lights go up, all the strange rock and rollers out there know they’re doing all right.
So hold on to each other. You gotta hold on tonight.
