Imagine The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Frank-N-Furter raised in the American Midwest by Vivienne Westwood. Or Debbie Harry, if she grew up in a queer bathhouse in East Berlin. That’s Hedwig Schmidt: the glam-rock heart of Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, brought to spectacular life in the first Aussie revival since 2006.
You have to picture this show as it began – in a sweaty basement club called the SqueezeBox during New York’s punk scene in 1994. This was a place where a house band performed rock tunes called “the music of gay bashers”, and punters put on messy drag to kick, scream and vamp on stage beside them. Hedwig was born out of this energy; a combination of cigarette ash, anarchism and smut inspired by Cameron Mitchell’s life in Berlin and Kansas and soundtracked by Trask’s work with the SqueezeBox band. It’s the closest I’ve come to calling a musical ‘punk’ without rolling my eyes. With its taboo-flouting lead and the unbridled chaos of its style, it is still as genuinely transgressive as it was thirty years ago.
This production succeeds by replicating the intimacy and anger that created the show in the first place. We’re somewhere in the Midwest waiting for Hedwig to start a 90-minute cabaret performance accompanied by her band, the Inch. The set (by Jeremy Allen) evokes an industrial warehouse and a dive-bar in one: think a simple circular rise centre stage with a staircase at the back furnished with cooly metallic scaffolds and exposed wire. And the costumes (designed by Nicol and Ford) cover the stellar cast – who also double as the on-stage band – in patchwork denim and glam rock glitter.
For the uninitiated, the show might seem a little impenetrable at first. There’s not much of a plot, really. It’s a series of loosely connected anecdotes drawn from Hedwig’s life that are both surreal and debaucherous. She’s gorging on gummy bears in a ditch by the Berlin Wall, discovering Lou Reed while locked in an oven, or recounting her botched gender-affirming surgery in graphic detail. But it’s not a cohesive storyline that propels Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It’s vibes, and Hedwig herself.
Seann Miley Moore is transcendent as our glamour goddess, achieving the perfect balance of taboo-flouting confidence, unpredictability and thinly-veiled fragility in between high kicks, soaring top notes and horny audience ad libs. As her husband, the retired drag queen Yitzhak, Adam Noviello offers a soulful counterpoint: brooding, pissy, stoic. Noviello’s operatic vibrato and Moore’s buttery tone combine beautifully to fill the Athenaeum Theatre to overflowing.
The vibe, meanwhile, resembles that propulsive brand of chaos you find drunk at an impromptu four am drag show – all sweat, screams and in-cast fighting underscored to a pub-rock backbeat (and the occasionally eerie theremin from expert music director, Victoria Falconer). It is refreshing to see a show that avoids the trap many other revivals of queer theatrical classics fall into by leaning into its transgressiveness instead of a nostalgia-heavy approach that would relegate it to being a mere artefact of a recent past. Co-directors Shane Anthony and Dino Dimitriadis have worked hard to faithfully replicate the show’s underground origins for the mainstage, leaving its essential edge intact.
We’re clapping along to Hedwig’s anthem for sugar daddies or watching a group of unsuspecting audience members don blonde wigs to join in on the chorus of 'Wig in a Box'. Even tropes like glitter bombs and balloon drops feel intimate in their immersiveness. Moore also never shies away from Hedwig’s flaws, whether via her morally dubious actions or jarring ad libs. In a world as risk-adverse as mainstage musical theatre, her thornier characteristics – matched by equally unbridled design and direction – make for a show that feels authentic and even quietly radical.
We talk a lot about the mainstreaming of queer culture these days. Look! There’s a Pride flag shirt at Target, another off-shoot of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, another green-lit Ryan Murphy series or another cop at Mardi Gras. We should be critical of connecting political progress with Absolut Vodka bottles covered in rainbow flags, or a floating shark decked out in Pride colours. But there hasn’t been a rainbow-coloured corporate wave for Pride this year, or even a tepid ripple. Late last month J.K. Rowling created an organisation dedicated to offering legal funding designed to support transphobia. This week there’s the possibility of a Pride march in Tel Aviv while Palestinians are murdered in line waiting for aid. SqueezeBox has been closed for years.
I do not mean to imply that this production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch is somehow politically radical or world changing. It’s not going to force us marching into the streets to protest queer freedoms – to throw new ‘bricks’ in defence of new ‘Stonewalls’. But it did have nearly 880 people laughing at Moore doing an impression of an owl as they treated Rowling’s transphobia with all the ridiculousness it deserves. It did end with us leaping to our feet to applaud a cast of gender-diverse people telling a story of connection and identity that began more than thirty years ago in a small club somewhere on the margins. Where this production succeeds is in making us believe that Hedwig Schmidt would at least lead us outside and hand us a brick – and that we’d have cause, mixed with a healthy dose of punk-like anger, to throw it with her.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch is showing at the Athenaeum Theatre until July 6. For more information and to book tickets, head to the website.
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