Die-hard fans of John Cameron Mitchell (text) and Steven Trask’s (music and lyrics) bawdy and divinely outrageous Tony Award winning Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998) were out in force for the show’s opening night as part of the Adelaide Festival.
While they got their fix, I’m a Hedwig virgin no more – shocked to the core just how much I was so entertained, so absorbed and so moved by the entire package in this new Australian production by co-directors Shane Anthony and Dino Dimitriadis
It started at the entrance to the temporarily fenced off yard in front of the Queens Theatre. You’re either “Sugar Daddy”, “East Berlin” or “Trailer Park” according to your ticket. By the way, I’d never been called a sugar daddy before but took no offence from the attendant with the sketchy midwestern accent.
In the yard itself, strung with washing out to dry (predominantly lingerie), a few bar tables dot the space and a groovy caravan stands to one side adjacent to several seating booths with a retro caravan-like vibe. The sense is that you’ve definitely been invited into another’s personal life.
And then, once inside the architecturally raw interior of this fit for purpose historic theatre, it’s not long before you meet Hedwig and her band, The Angry Inch. Perched on a cozy circular platform and revealed from under a silvery tubular festooned curtain (set design by Jeremy Allen), it’s as if Hedwig emerges from her cocoon to tell her story. And it’s a mesmerising doozy!
In a nutshell, she’s a genderqueer East German glam-rocker living in a caravan in Kansas. Born and raised as “girlyboy” Hansel Schmidt, she’s the victim of a botched sex-change operation that left her with a closed vagina scarred by a mound of flesh. Ew!
Hedwig is performing with her four piece band and her scolded and belittled husband and former Croatian drag queen, Yitzhak, as her backup singer. They’re in a second rate establishment that backs onto the main venue where her former lover Tommy Gnosis, who she presumed was her soulmate, is having a successful national tour.
It’s a story of the struggle to find identity, acceptance and completeness, where numerous lines of division – both real and metaphorical – and intrinsic dualities are battled and shaped.
It’s not lost, for example, that Hedwig holds dear the idea taught to her that individuals are not complete until they find their other half – based on a story drawn directly from Plato’s Symposium about how humans were once twin-bodied creatures combining two genders.
Nor is it lost that long-gone Hansel, as Hedwig, wears a flamboyant Gretel-styled blonde wig or that Hedwig’s first move to Phoenix USA signifies a rising from the trauma of having been coerced into a sex-change to a renewal of herself, and that the rear door to the main unseen venue is both a spatial divide and psychological barrier.
In all this mix, the idea that a part of us could be taken away in our experiences of life and relationships pervades the piece as it seesaws between thoughts of the gutter and the cosmos. It’s a kind of therapy session – with a full load of irreverent innuendo that suits the tone – for both Hedwig and audience alike.
For its 95 minutes of glamoured grunge, hilarity and seriousness, Seann Miley Moore’s (SMM) performance in the title role is nothing short of astounding.
SMM, who breathtakingly starred as The Engineer in Cameron Mackintosh’s recent production of Miss Saigon, dishes out Hedwig’s wildly vulgar, cocky and histrionic qualities with unbounded oomph. Crucially, it’s a performance starting with instant charisma and seduction as SMM lays bare Hedwig’s intensely personal monologue and raft of meaningfully crafted and delivered songs.
From encouraging the audience to give her a “warm entrance” (cue lowering of her hands to the genitalia) to licking suggestively at them and the microphone and cavorting in all sorts of sexually inclined ways, SMM electrifies the narrative. SMM is also stupendously adept in navigating the chameleon-like demands for switching character and in adding a comical incision to what might be a serious issue.
Brilliant support comes from Adam Noviello’s radiant-voiced but gloom-ridden Yitzhak and the band led by musical director Victoria Falconer on keyboards with Glenn Moorhouse and Felicity Freeman on guitars and Jarrad Payne on drums.
The music is a balanced mix between edgy punk and soulful ballads. An horrific squirm-inducing feeling surfaces when SMM shares Hedwig’s details of the botched surgery with an underlying aching aggression in the pulsating rock number, The Angry Inch.
Tear Me Down is a stunning opener cultivated with meaning and Wig in a Box morphs into uproarious delight as SMM sports a fabulous knee-length coat of blonde wigs – Nicol and Ford’s costume designs are perfectly loud, distinctive and sexy.
You can laugh at the banal (Hedwig’s agent being Phyllis Stein) and the borderline improper (Hedwig’s mother teaching pottery to limbless children). And when she wipes her make up off on a towel in reference to the Shroud of Turin, underlying the comedy is a sense of both self-preservation and the need for redemption.
That redemption comes in a climactic turn as Yitzhak is permitted to be himself after Hedwig’s condition for marrying him was that he never wore the wigs he wanted to. It leaves you heartened.
Leaving on a high and stepping back into the yard, Hedwig’s presence is palpable. Her caravan is there to be investigated and enjoyed. She has bravely opened herself up to us, revealing her truth, abuse and pain alongside the vulnerabilities, ambiguities and dreams. And, if she was sitting there in this little slice of her existence, you’d dearly love to hug her.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
The Queens Theatre, Corner of Playhouse Lane & Gilles Arcade, Adelaide
Performance: Wednesday 26 February 2025
Season continues to 15 March 2025
Bookings: www.adelaidefestival.com.au
For more information, visit: www.hedwig.com.au for details.
Images: Seann Miley Moore in Hedwig and the Angry Inch – photo by Shane Reid | Adam Noviello and Seann Miley Moore in Hedwig and the Angry Inch – photo by Shane Reid Seann Miley Moore in Hedwig and the Angry Inch – photo by Shane Reid
Review: Paul Selar