Anatomy of a Drag Queen

By Richard Zoglin

When Hedwig was still called Hansel, a sexually confused "girly boy" growing up in communist East Berlin, he used to listen to American rock 'n' roll in the only place he could find privacy: sticking his head in the family oven. Later an American serviceman arranged for a sex-change operation (a botched one, leaving just an "angry inch" of scar tissue) so the two could marry and emigrate to America. Hedwig wound up in a trailer park in Kansas, where her G.I. abandoned her. Then she met Tommy Gnosis, a rock singer whom she helped turn into a superstar, but not before he had dumped her too. Now all that's left for Hedwig is to tell her life story in a confessional cabaret show, which has become off-Broadway's latest cult hit, Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Drag performances, from the late Charles Ludlum to Lypsinka, have a long, honored tradition in Manhattan's downtown theater scene. But this is a wig of a different color. John Cameron Mitchell, who wrote the show and does a smashing turn (accompanied by a grungy back-up band) as the fictional Hedwig, avoids high camp, low sex jokes and Judy Garland impressions. True, Hedwig's stage patter has its share of double entendres ("I do love a warm hand on my entrance"), but the literate script is also a poignant meditation on loneliness, gender confusion and the Platonic notion that sex is the effort to reconnect two halves of one ideal being. All of this is embellished by 10 muscular, melodic rock songs by Stephen Trask, which combine hard-driving punk with Beatles-style lyricism for the most exciting hard-rock score written for the theater since, oh, maybe ever.

Mitchell, who has acted on Broadway (The Secret Garden) and in TV sitcoms (Party Girl), had wanted to do a rock musical ever since being "annoyed" by Broadway's Tommy. "Rock on stage is always submerged, diluted," he says. "I wanted to do something that was truly rock 'n' roll and truly theater." He teamed up with Trask, the leader of a band called Cheater, and the two developed the show in a series of downtown club gigs. Mitchell even passed up a role in Rent (as the drag queen Angel) to keep at it. After searching in vain for a theater, the show landed in a renovated ballroom at the Hotel Riverview, a flophouse near the Hudson River that once sheltered the surviving crew of the Titanic.

Now Mitchell may have the Titanic of drag musicals. Since opening on Valentine's Day, Hedwig has attracted a mix of uptown theatergoers, kids from the club scene and celebrities like Goldie Hawn, Glenn Close and David Bowie. The show just won an Outer Critics Circle award for best off-Broadway musical, a concept album is in the works, and there's already talk of a movie. Couldn't happen to a nicer girly boy.

--By Richard Zoglin