Mitchell and Trask's Hedwig and the Angry Inch

by Caridad Svich

'… love creates something that was not there before.' – Hedwig John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask ’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch opened on Valentine’s Day,1998, in New York City, and ever since, it and its genderqueer heroine have captivated audiences around the world. As the first musical to feature a genderqueer protagonist as its lead, the show has had an extraordinary life on film, Broadway and in the music field. A glam rock musical with a complex relationship to issues related to art, eroticism and matters of identity formation, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a darkly exuberant fairy tale about a child that discovers she is one of a kind, but also potentially among her own kind, if she dares travel past borders that confine and try to stabilise her being and identity. Caridad Svich examines this exhilarating work through the lenses of visual and vocal rock ’n’ roll performance, the history of the American musical, and its positioning within LGBTIQ+ theatre.

72 pages, Paperback

Published July 9, 2019

Reviews

[James Tierney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Routledge’s Fourth Wall series has a remit to be brisk and accessible so Caridad Svich’s ‘Mitchell and Trask’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch’ hits its subjects of memoir, LGBT representation and the development of this century’s best musical (so far) with the breathy rush of a song. It is then entirely my fault given the musical’s fascinating use of 70s musical tropes, early period fluidity and rich production history that I felt it would have more than borne the weight of an operatic scrutiny. But then I’m always confusing my genres.

[Angelique · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great little insight into Hedwig...it made me wanna re watch the film and I did! I liked the insight about walls never truly are ripped down. And how ripe with meaning Hedwig is.

[zcc]

very confusingly spent most of the book telling us the plot and a sizable amount tracking black history on broadway. very minimal actually about the experience of seeing the show or its impact

[Jessica López-Barkl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this little book today that is one in many things I'm exploring in preparation for directing HEDWIG. This was a lovely little bite into the inspirations and politics of this landmark rock musical. I liked hearing Svich's perspective on seeing the show for the first time at the Jane Street Theatre in 1998, and all of the culture that surrounded the play at that time. I also appreciated how the little book was couched with her first impressions to the evolution of the shadows in the play on a hyper-capitalistic world that has left the grit of the West Village in 1998 and taken a shine to the Disneyfication of the Great White Way. And, yet, the mysticism and journey of Hedwig still strikes the audience in the way that Mitchell and Trask had hoped...an experience cannot be contained or taken away by too much glitz.

I also liked the careful analysis/His/story of the plot and the songs in the chapter entitled "Her/story".

There are a lot of things to unpack from this reading, and, yet, we, as theater artists and audiences can only retain what applies to our own experience and our own desires...