hedwig and the angry inch
Matt and I bought two last minute tickets to see Hedwig and the Angry Inch at Too 2 Much in Soho. We didn't really know what to expect. I had vague notions of something like the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It definitely takes after Rocky Horror, but it's less a musical, more a cabaret show with a few singing interludes. Though all the songs are fantastic, with great tunes and excellent clever lyrics.
It begins as Hedwig, resplendant in glittering drag, enters the room and begins to tell us about his life. He used to be Hansel, a boy growing up in 1970s Germany with his cold mother and paedophile father, listening to American radio in the oven because that's the only place his mother would let him do it. In time he falls in love with a GI, Luther, who persuades Hansel to have a sex change operation so that he can marry him and go to America. The operation is botched, and he is left with a mutilated "angry inch".
After Luther leaves him, he realises that his future lies in being a rock n roll drag queen, and so he becomes Hedwig.
It's an interesting premise for a musical show, and it really works. It is mostly hilarious, but in the manner of drag and cabaret, it has a raw, dark and moving side that is often hard to bear.
The central theme of Hedwig and the Angry Inch is love, and the idea of finding your 'other half', the one person who will make us whole. One of the loveliest songs in the show is called The Origin of Love. It's based on a story told in Plato's Symposium,
where in the first age of humanity the gods made us four-legged with two heads and two sets of sex organs, but such was our power that the gods decided to separate us down the middle. The four-legged creatures had three sexes, either male-male, male-female, or female-female, and depending on who their other half had previously been the new two-legged creatures were heterosexual or homosexual.
The lyrics of the song say it much better than that though:
Last time I saw you we had just split in two.
You were looking at me, I was looking at you.
You had a way so familiar, but I could not recognize,
Cause you had blood on your face; I had blood in my eyes.
But I could swear by your expression that the pain down in your soul
Was the same as the one down in mine.
That's the pain cuts a straight line down through the heart;
We call it love.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch has lots of twists and turns, and doesn't seem to offer any particular judgement on sexuality and gender, save that there is little that is fixed and certain. And that there is redemption for the "misfits and the losers" in the glory of rock and roll!
It was great seeing the show in Too 2 Much - its decadent strip club ambience was the perfect setting. We were sat in the comfy sofa 'cabaret' seats which are arranged in a couple of tiers around the stage. The price of the ticket included a glass of champagne and we followed up with cocktails, which went well with the glam rock drag tragedy that unfolded before us.
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