Hedwig And The Angry Inch ★★★★★
Peregine Theater Company
It seems somehow appropriate that the writer John Cameron Mitchell who based the musical Hedwig and The Angry Inch on part of his own life story is a regular summer resident of Provincetown. For if there ever was a safe haven for Hedwig, a transexual from East Germany to settle safely in the US, it should be here.
Although she never made it to Ptown, Mitchell’s Tony Award Winning Musical that he composed with Stephen Trask has. Its the latest stunning production from the Messrs Berrys whose Peregrine Theater Company was very sorely missed during the pandemic. For the past decade they have single-handedly help raise the barrier of the quality of musical theater that is such a part of our culture now.
Hedwig is very much a two-hander piece (they did expand it for the film version) and the story starts when Hedwig is still Hansel Schmidt, a “slip of a girlyboy” growing up in East Berlin. Raised by an emotionally distant single mother after her father, an American soldier, abandoned the family, Hansel takes solace in her love of western rock music.
Hedwig, as she later becomes is the narrator of her story, which she is desperately keen to share with the audience. She is fixated with a story called “The Origin of Love” where angry gods split these early humans in two. She is determined to search for her other half, but is convinced she will have to travel to the West to do so. In her 20’s she thinks she finds just the means to do this when he meets Luther Robinson, an American soldier who convinces her to begin dressing in drag.
He falls in love with her and proposes marriage, and this will allow Hansel to leave communist East Germany, but only if she were a woman and his wife. . So she finds a doctor to perform a genital reassignment surgery, but he botches it up and she is left with an enlarged vagina….. which she calls her angry inch.
Hedwig’s only one friend is also her assistant, back-up singer and husband, Yitzhak, a Jewish drag queen from Zagreb, who has an unhealthy, codependent relationship with Hedwig. He shares the stage with Hedwig accepting all the abuse heaped upon him, and she does her level best keeping from us that he is actually more talented than her .
This is however a love story complicated by the fact that Hedwig is really in love with herself, but the truth has never been an important issue in musical theater, particularly in a rock’n roll one like this. But it is an excellent vehicle to show the remarkable talents of the two young actors Alec Diem and Ash Moran, both recent graduates from Detroit. They give such stunning passionate performances that belie their age as they make the 90 minutes seem to pass by so impossibly fast.
Peregrine has alway been rightly recognised for their attention to detail, and with their extraordinary set by Thea Goldman they may have outdone themselves. They enhanced it by having a camerman on/off the stage whose images became part of the every changing back wall. It was an inspired idea and frankly a real visual treat.
i always come away from a Peregrine Production feeling that this is the combined effort of a crew that seem to be part of one large family. After all this ie 4th (excellent) Peregine Production from Tony Award winner Kyle Pleasant. Plus as the band on stage led by Yaron Spivak were visible to us we could see them really enjoying themsleves.
Asides from being so highly entertained we were also aware that a show dealing with gender like this, makes the right statement in these troubling political times. I hope that the message we take away from Hedwig, and also from the Rocky Horror Show, empowers us to continue to fight for equality for all parts of the LGBTQA+ community
ROGER WALKER-DACK Creator, Editor-in-Chief Miami Beach, FL / Provincetown, MA IG @QUEERGURU Member of G.A.L.E.C.A. (Gay & Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association) and NLGJA The Association of LGBT Journalists. and The Online Film Critics Society. Ex Contributing Editor The Gay Uk & Contributor Edge Media Former CEO and Menswear Designer of Roger Dack Ltd in the UK
Labels: 2024, Adem Berry, Alec Dien, Ash Moran, Ben Berry, Hedwig And The Angry Inch, Kyle Pleasant, Peregrine Theater, Provincetown, Queerguru, revoew
