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Also this issue: 25 Alive Strange New World Roughing It Philling the Gaps A View to a Quilt |
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July 18-24, 2002
theater
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HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH Through July 27, Painted Bride Art Center, Third and Vine sts., 215-925-9914
Looking like a beat-up Sarah Jessica Parker, David Colbert belts out one terrific song after another. But Hedwig and the Angry Inch is not just a rock cabaret show, although it certainly is that. It is also a moving and witty drama about love and sexual identity and freedom.
This production, with an accompanying band called GOD-The Band, is gritty and mordant. What begins like a cheesy basement band practice turns on its power as soon as Hedwig, a refugee from East Berlin before the Wall fell, begins to speak.
The divided city is the show's central emblem: There always seems to be an elusive other half (of Berlin, of personality, of gender, of a relationship) that seems to have run off with all the good stuff. This yin-and-yang view is dramatized by Hedwig's unhappy life, which she began as Hansel (looking inevitably for his Gretel).
American soldier and lover Luther marries her and brings her back to the United States, although the tradeoff for this escape is a transsexual operation, which the surgeon botches, leaving Hedwig with only "an angry inch" and a dismal life as a divorcee in a trailer. A teenage music-obsessed boy named Tommy Gnosis
becomes her partner, then steals her songs and becomes a star.
As an “internationally ignored” punk chanteuse, Hedwig’s show is punctuated by her opening the door to let us hear Tommy’s self-aggrandizing crowd-pleasing patter during a huge concert. David Colbert does all the voices -- Luther, Tommy and Hedwig -- proving himself an impressive actor as well as a killer singer. The tilt of his head, the purse of his mouth and a caustic intelligence gives a deeply human reality to Hedwig under the glitter makeup and Saran-Wrap dresses.
By the end, the stage is strewn with beer bottles and blond wigs, overturned stools and tomatoes and an abandoned bustier. The happy ending of self-acceptance is met with the audience’s arm-waving joy (“Lift up your hands”). Written by John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask, Hedwig defines what off-Broadway really can be -- it is far more radical than, say, Rent -- and the show has since become a cult film. As one of the many shrewd lyrics goes: “From this milkless tit, you sucked the business we call show.” Indeed they have.
