Around this time last year I went to see a live performance
of Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the Drake Underground. The production took the
form of a rock show with the lead singer telling her life story between songs.
Seth Drabinsky dazzled as Hedwig.
The musical tells the fictional story of a musician who grew
up in East Berlin. As a young adult, then called Hansel, he falls in love with
an American G.I. who wants to marry him, but only if he has sex reassignment
surgery.
Drabinsky’s portrayal was involving and adept. Trained in
opera, his voice was extremely powerful. Most of the songs are glam rock, and
his falsetto spanned graceful to aggressive. In this live version Drabinsky
played many of the supporting characters with his voice. I did a double take
when Hedwig was describing meeting the G.I. and her voice suddenly became his
voice – low, macho and American.
There’s an intriguing myth told by Hedwig’s mother: The
Origin of Love. The idea is that in the beginning people had two heads, four
sets of limbs and looked like two people back to back. The gods became scared
of the people’s strength, so they split them in half, and the reason we fall in
love is we’re looking for that other half.
In the movie that section is told with animation in a very
minimalist style. The two parts of a person look like a circle torn in half.
When the halves join it looks like a face. I want to get a tattoo of that, like
Hedwig in the movie. My friend pointed out to me that it’s easy to think that
the meaning of that song is that love completes us. On closer examination,
though, the message is of self-love.
The role of Hedwig is designed to be played by an actor who
also plays her nemesis and ex, Tommy Gnosis. At the end of the musical, Seth
Drabinsky sang in Tommy’s style and he could literally have been the singer of
a band like Blink-182. The finale is the lovely ballad Midnight Radio. I take
it to be about inner reconciliation. The core idea: “Know that you’re whole.”
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