It’s impossible to deny that the wild applause and
screams of aproval for Neil Patrick Harris in Hedwig
and the Angry Inch are the sounds of an audience enjoying their
experience; but I’m just cynical enough to think that has less to do with the
delivery of the musical itself than the fact that the musical comes in the guise of a rock concert being
performed by an extravagant, quippy transvestite (payed by a star who knows exactly how to work the room) and his band.
But fueling the musical is what's really, or should be, important: a slender story about a young man who was so desperate to
escape from behind the Iron Curtain that he submitted to a sex change operation
that would turn out to be a botch job, leaving him with…well, the angry inch. And how that
has affected his life and relationships since (one relationship in particular).
Harris, who of course plays Hedwig, has become a musical theatre idol, because of his clear adoration of the genre, his
extraordinary versatility and his gleefully irreverent (yet genuinely
love-driven) emceeing of the Tony Awards for the last several years. And
there’s no question that he’s perfect casting for Hedwig, nor that he has the requisite acting chops to do the
story component as much justice as the rock concert component.
But
director Michael Mayer, as he does quite often, has “buried the
lead” to use a journalist’s term (and employ a pun, come to think of it) behind
projections and rock concert effects, such that the narrative material between
songs, that takes you to a very sad and exposed place—or that’s supposed
to—seems more like special material, bereft of the gravitas needed to make
the emotional points really land. They sure didn't for me, in any event.
And
as I say, it would seem for many, perhaps most, that this doesn’t
really
matter. They’re there for the event more than the story, they
understand
enough; and the estimable Mr. Harris, even though (seemingly)
undirected in any meaningful way (the mechanics of stagecraft aside),
knows how
to deliver an evening of persona that satisfies them.
But
if the rock-concert/star-turn aspects by themselves aren’t enough for you
(partucularly if you’re not constitutionally built to dig a rock concert without
the über-theatrical context to validate the experience as a metaphor for
something larger), then I suspect that, as I did, you may find this iteration
of Hedwig to be more than a few angry inches short of the mark.
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