Hedwig and the Angry Inch's Original Cast Album

If the play's structure is traditional, however, everything else about it is decidedly millennial: part drag show, part heavy glam-rock concert, and part therapy session, Hedwig is an Off-Broadway revelation in which a would-be transsexual discourses on philosophy, celebrity, and the fall of Communism with the backing of Cheater, an actual alt-rock band (keyboardist Stephen Trask penned the music and lyrics; John Cameron Mitchell, the original Hedwig, wrote the book).

The opening number likens our East German emigré protagonist to the Berlin Wall. "Try to tear me down!/ Without me right in the middle,/ You would be nothing at all." Most of the songs are about how we destroy the obstacles to our happiness only to find that they constructed our identities.

"Angry Inch" is perhaps the most painful exploration of this theme. To a driving, Fugazi-esque rain of power chords and overeager choruses, Hedwig describes how her "sex change operation got botched": afterwards, one inch of penis still remained, and "Now all I've got/ Is a Barbie-Doll crotch." Tracks six and seven are pure genius. "Wig in a Box" describes this unfortunate androgyne's epiphany in a trailer park. Over an easy '70s jam, she realizes when "I pull the wig down off the shelf/ Suddenly I'm this punk-rock star.../ I ain't never coming back." Soon after meeting young rock wannabe Tommy, Hedwig promises to be his mentor and lover on "Wicked Little Town," a blend of the most atmospheric Radiohead and the saddest Verve.

As a pure recording, Hedwig documents this realization in a stunningly listenable rock idiom. The only disappointment is that it gives us no opportunity to witness Hedwig's climactic, redemptive face-off with Tommy Gnosis. What in the theater is a breathtaking merging and completion
of identities becomes on the CD a beautiful and stirring--but very isolated--"Midnight Radio." To listen to the
song, it seems a celebration of the redemptive power of rock: "All you strange rock 'n'rollers/ You know you're doing alright./ Here's to Patti and Tina and Yoko, Aretha/ And me."

It would be foolish, however, to criticize a cast album for failing to recreate the experience of the theater. Especially a cast album that, on the whole, stands very well on its own ermine-erudite terms. (Atlantic)

--Barry Levey

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