Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Directed by John Cameron Mitchell.
Songs by Stephen Trask.
Starring John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Pitt, Miriam Shor & Alberta Watson.
Glam! Bam! Thank you, ma’am! (Or should that be ’man!’?) This sums up Hedwig, the transsexual glam punk rock musical. We meet Hedwig (John Cameron Mitchell) leading her band of weirdoes around the diners of America, stalking teen rock sensation Tommy Gnosis whom Hedwig believes has stolen her music. A series of rollicking punk rock numbers reveals her story: Hansel grew up in East Berlin. Desperate to escape to the West (which he knows only through American Sector radio and television — remember the Cold War, kids?), he undergoes a sex-change operation (becoming Hedwig with ’an angry inch’) and marries an American GI. Finding herself lost in American trailer-park land Hedwig returns to her first love, rock music.
My only criticisms are that the pace of the film slows towards the end (possibly the result of trying to add more substance to the original stage-show), and that Michael Pitt as Tommy Gnosis has all the presence of Dougie the pizza-boy. The story is not very plausible or deep but I didn’t care. It’s fun and funny. It’s less laboured than Priscilla and has infinitely more pathos. It uses music as a medium of narrative and characterisation as effectively as Moulin Rouge and with greater naturalness. It’s a genre that does not normally float my boat but Hedwig has such energy that it’s definitely bop-able. The live version must have been really something.
P.S. You should all know that the parable about the gods splitting primordial humans in two, love being the sensation felt by the two halves when they find each other again, comes from Plato’s Symposium.
Guy
