Steve Noll
"Hedwig and the Angry Inch," StageQ, 2023.
Kai Prins (front) and Elise Bargman in "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," StageQ, 2023.
When we meet Hedwig, she is caught in the in-between again. Between shows. Between genders. Between countries and ideologies. Between relationships. And it’s wearing on her.
Born as “Hansel” to an absent American GI father and a cold German mother, Hedwig grows up in partitioned East Berlin — “a slip of a girly boy” chafing at his communist surroundings and boxed in on every side. When his American lover Luther proposes marriage, offering him a chance to escape over the wall to begin a new life in the U.S., there’s just “one small piece of himself he must leave behind.” But a botched sex-change operation leaves Hedwig mutilated, anatomically neither a man nor a woman. And a year after their marriage, Luther leaves too.
As Hedwig tells it, her inspiration for a new life came in the early ’90s as she sat alone in a trailer park in Kansas, watching the Berlin Wall come down on pirated cable TV. With a new wig, a new attitude, and a love of ’70s music she heard on Armed Forces Radio as a kid, she started fronting an “internationally ignored” punk rock band. And the rest...is a delightfully strange, moving, slightly transgressive and entertaining evening at the Bartell, where StageQ’s current production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch is playing with alternating casts, through March 25.
Rising from below stage on a mechanical lift, Hedwig enters the Drury Stage with a lot of style and sexual energy. Her signature blonde wig emerges first, sporting enormous curled bangs that look like wings. Wearing fishnets, black leather boots, a denim vest and short-shorts, and a shimmering gold corset, she is all long legs and punk glamor. (Spot on costume design by Drake R. Lewerenz.) From the very beginning of the evening a few things are clear: Hedwig is going to tell you the story of her life, with a self-deprecating, cynical honesty that’s simultaneously witty and heartbreaking; she is still emotionally raw after the end of a relationship with an ascending pop star who stole her heart and most of her material; and she is here to rock.
Kai Prins’s Hedwig is as fragile as she is fierce, as brash as she is broken. Assuming dozens of practiced, erotic poses, Prins commandeers the mic and constantly adjusts the stand with the touch of an accomplished lover. With an expansive vocal range, they easily deliver the musical’s numbers, from driving anthems to tender love songs. Hedwig’s set is a musical journey through her life, told in many moods. She begins by attacking the stage with “Tear Me Down,” then prowling through the audience with the racy “Sugar Daddy,” and vents her rage through “Angry Inch.” Taking totally different tones, Hedwig reinvents herself with “Wig in a Box,” muses about her failed relationship in “Wicked Little Town,” and recounts a bedtime story from her childhood that informs and haunts her adult life in “The Origin of Love.” It’s a wild ride for audiences, and one Prins manages with startling emotional truth.
Though this feels like a one-person show, there is another character onstage, lurking toward the wings. Hedwig introduces her husband Yitzhak as a drag queen who used to open for her shows, until he got too popular. Their marriage is only about control, which is on display in big and small ways throughout the performance. With few lines, Elise Bargman imbues Yitzhak with a flurry of emotions — anger, resentment, jealousy, hurt and longing. Singing breathy, sometimes pitchy back-up on Hedwig’s songs and occasionally lashing out, Yitzhak is the target of Hedwig’s misplaced aggression for much of the performance. When at last Yitzhak has permission to be their true self — the same plea that Hedwig herself has made for most of the show — it is glorious.
Lu M. Meinders’ scenic design uses the Drury Stage space extremely well. Stripped down to black walls dressed with a few posters, it could convincingly pass for an abandoned concert space, simply filled with the band for a rock show — drums, keyboards, bass and guitar. (The Angry Inch band members deliver the show’s music with ease, while appearing completely emotionally detached from their front person or the audience. I have never seen a more oddly stoic group.) Zak Stowe’s lighting design does most of the heavy lifting for the show visually, adding movement and mood to each song, enhanced by stage fog effects.
In their directors’ notes, Shawn D. Padley and Jay Gile expressed their hesitation to take on such an unorthodox piece of musical theater. They wrote that they grounded themselves by focusing on Hedwig’s complex relationships — with parents, lovers, her own sense of self, and within larger societies. This impulse served the directors and the show very well. Ultimately StageQ’s production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch is about a person who wants to love and be loved. Ideas about gender, performance, appearance, acceptance, wholeness and visibility are layered deftly on top of that need, which is central to all of us.
[Editor's note: The cast members' names have been corrected to reflect the correct cast.]
