The rock’n’roll drag diva played by John Cameron Mitchell in Hedwig and the Angry Inch was born 31,000 feet in the sky. In 1990, Mitchell was an aspiring playwright and erstwhile actor en route to New York from Los Angeles when he met musician Stephen Trask, the only other person not watching the in-flight movie. The two quickly bonded over their mutual tastes in film and music. It was the start of a lifelong friendship that would lead to this darkly funny rock musical—first an off-Broadway hit, then a cult film and Tony-winning Broadway production—about an “internationally ignored song stylist” with an ax to grind against her superstar ex-boyfriend.
Frustrated by his work as an actor, Mitchell was eager to kick off his playwriting career and found a kindred spirit in Trask. The two built the foundation for Hedwig for over a year, incorporating far-reaching and idiosyncratic inspirations: Plato’s symposiums, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, and malleable gender performances from the glam-rock era. In the summer of 1994, they started workshopping the show at the downtown NYC gay punk club SqueezeBox!, where Trask led the house band. At the musician’s suggestion, the protagonist shifted to a drag character, a disappointed singer who’s left in the dust.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch didn’t exactly begin as a story about a flamboyant rocker, but instead a meek Army general’s son. Mitchell himself moved more than 20 times as the child of an Army commandant, a lifestyle that isolated him as a young person struggling with his sexuality. He found respite in bands like the Cars and the B-52’s, as well as glam-rock groups like Sweet. When Mitchell was 14, his family settled for a time near a base in Junction City, Kansas. There, he met Helga, a German-born Army wife who lived in a trailer park and worked as a prostitute. She’d smoke cigarettes in a tube top and capri pants and let him drink beer and act out pop songs in her trailer.
Standing onstage at SqueezeBox! some 20 years later, that brief memory of Helga spun out into Hedwig’s winged Farrah Fawcett wig, towering heels, and torn fishnet stockings. Though Mitchell had never done drag or sang in a band, he inhabited the pithy German mannerisms and performative bravura instantly, earning high praise from club regulars.
Over the next four years, Mitchell and Trask developed Hedwig and the Angry Inch into a full-fledged production, with Trask providing original songs and playing Skszp, Angry Inch’s bandleader. By the time the show opened at the Jane Street Theater in 1998, its lurid backstory was set: Born in East Germany the year the Berlin Wall went up, Hedwig (née Hansel) became obsessed with gender-bending glam and punk gods like David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop via American Armed Forces radio. He met a G.I. sugar daddy who offered to whisk him away to America under one condition: a sex change operation. He reluctantly agreed but the surgery was botched, leaving our protagonist with the titular “angry inch” of flesh. Rechristened Hedwig, she was plopped down in Junction City and soon left to fend for herself. She wrote music and dated/mentored Tommy, a confused teen who eventually dumped her, stole her songs, and scored it big as a proto-Marilyn Manson. The timeline catches up to Hedwig and her band years later, as she shrieks out the whole sad story onstage at a seedy New York nightclub.
Equal parts wounded tragedy, high-camp drama, and death-defying rock musical, the original Hedwig show blended concepts about gender and sexuality with a razored punk edge. (Hedwig’s queerness aside, Mitchell cast actress Miriam Shor as her aggrieved ex-drag queen husband/backup singer, further challenging the audience’s assumptions about gender in theater and rock’n’roll.) The production netted a rave review from The New York Times and became a hot ticket, with both Bowie and Reed turning up to see it. After a year off-Broadway, Mitchell started turning the role over to different actors, owing to the sheer physical cost of embodying the character every night. But when influential independent film producer Christine Vachon inquired about a screen adaptation, Mitchell got right back into Hedwig’s heels to star and direct. From: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/revisiting-hedwig-and-the-angry-inch-a-drag-rock-fantasy-that-was-ahead-of-its-time/
