Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

She makes her entrance like a star dying to be born—goose-stepping through the audience with the arrogant aplomb of Marlene Dietrich and Jim Morrison; decked out like a trailer-park tart’s idea of a glam-rock fox, in stonewashed denim, an Aryan-yellow, blow-dried mane and red-glitter lipstick; accompanied by the refried Queen strains of ‘‘America the Beautiful’’ and a marvelously surly introduction by her crusty Serbian valet boy toy, Yitzhak: ‘‘Ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not—Hedwig!’’ That’s how Rolling Stone described the first moments of the monumentally innovative, ‘‘neo-glam, post-punk, rock musical’’ HedwigandtheAngryInch.Realrockandroll—glam,heavymetal, alittlepunk—hadcometotheAmericanmusicaltheatrewithout being diluted. And if there was any question about its intentions , the show stated its musical manifesto in its first moments , as the lead guitar wailed a heavily distorted ‘‘America the Beautiful.’’ This was real rock and it was uniquely American. Glam rock was a mostly British genre that brought theatricality and show biz back to rock and roll. Its music and lyrics were less artsy, less sophisticated, more playful and more accessible . Though authenticity had been the measure of quality, at least in American rock, glam admitted its falseness; it spit on authenticity and borrowed from everything, including bubblegum pop, hard rock, guitar rock, folk rock, heavy metal, and progressive rock. Glam rock admitted the artifice and artistic cannibalism that its predecessors tried to hide. It embraced the elevation of form over content. Glam celebrated the mask, the playing of a role, and in admitting its artificiality, it was really the most honest of all genres. Some compared the glam rockers to Oscar Wilde and Quentin Crisp. And of course, glam also erased the line (some would call it an arbitrary line) between genders. Just as Rocky Horror used glam and its descendent , punk, as its models, Hedwig uses the language of glam because it was the only genre and the only time in rock and roll history in which gender lines were erased; there was no male and female in glam. It was the only language really made for Hedwig’s story. Punk rock emerged from glam in the mid-1970s as the yang to glam’s yin, as a conscious rejection of the excesses and . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hedwig and the Angry Inch Hedwig and the Angry Inch [ 205 homogenization of commercial rock and roll, as well as those of glam (which is why the punk-inspired ‘‘Exquisite Corpse’’ in Hedwig literally explodes out of the more glam-inspired introspection of ‘‘Hedwig’s Lament ’’). The history of rock and roll has always been the story of the struggle for supremacy between the beat (and ‘‘bad’’ content) versus the melody (and ‘‘good’’ content). As the art form has evolved, its pendulum has swung reliably back and forth, as the beat first gained the upper hand in the 1950s, but then that rowdy energy of early rock and roll was commercialized and made palatable. As each new rebellion in music gains an audience, that rebellion is appropriated and commercialized by the music companies, as the rebel music of one generation becomes the sanitized pop music of the next. The same thing happened with punk, and most recently with hip-hop. Once again today, the beat has taken prominence , almost eliminating melody in much of hip-hop music. By the early and mid-1970s, mainstream rock had become so commercial , so manufactured, so middle class, so tied to money, and it had been largely taken away from the real artists by multinational corporations. Hedwig ant the Angry Inch, one of the most innovative, most shocking, most brilliant new musicals in years, was created for similar reasons. It rejected the spectacle of Miss Saigon, the overearnestness of Jekyll & Hyde, the pretentious self-awareness of The Lion King, the mind-numbing emptiness of Phantom of the Opera, and the boy-gets-girl myth of oldfashioned musical comedy. Hedwig even references the famous phrase ‘‘filthy lucre,’’ which was how London’s Daily Express described a 1976 appearance on British tv by the punk rockers the Sex Pistols—who later adopted the phrase themselves as a badge of honor. Hedwig, in other words, was the punk of musical theatre. Hedwig and the Angry Inch was born at the same time that Rent was being developed. John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s rock musical began its life in January 1994 at a new drag rock club in Manhattan called Squeeze Box. Mitchell and Trask had...