Latest news with #HedwigandtheAngryInch
Time Out
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Ed's Note: Hailed by Rolling Stone as 'the best rock musical ever', Hedwig and the Angry Inch is on now at Sydney's Carriageworks (you can buy tickets over here). Time Out critic Guy Webster reviewed the production last month when it was on at Melbourne's Athenaeum Theatre. Read on for his five-star review... ***** Imagine The Rocky Horror Picture Show's Frank-N-Furter raised in the American Midwest by Vivienne Westwood. Or Debbie Harry, if she grew up in a queer bathhouse in East Berlin. That's Hedwig Schmidt: the glam-rock heart of Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch, brought to spectacular life in the first Aussie revival since 2006. You have to picture this show as it began – in a sweaty basement club called the SqueezeBox during New York's punk scene in 1994. This was a place where a house band performed rock tunes called 'the music of gay bashers', and punters put on messy drag to kick, scream and vamp on stage beside them. Hedwig was born out of this energy; a combination of cigarette ash, anarchism and smut inspired by Cameron Mitchell's life in Berlin and Kansas and soundtracked by Trask's work with the SqueezeBox band. It's the closest I've come to calling a musical 'punk' without rolling my eyes. With its taboo-flouting lead and the unbridled chaos of its style, it is still as genuinely transgressive as it was thirty years ago. This production succeeds by replicating the intimacy and anger that created the show in the first place. We're somewhere in the Midwest waiting for Hedwig to start a 90-minute cabaret performance accompanied by her band, the Inch. The set (by Jeremy Allen) evokes an industrial warehouse and a dive-bar in one: think a simple circular rise centre stage with a staircase at the back furnished with cooly metallic scaffolds and exposed wire. And the costumes (designed by Nicol and Ford) cover the stellar cast – who also double as the on-stage band – in patchwork denim and glam rock glitter. For the uninitiated, the show might seem a little impenetrable at first. There's not much of a plot, really. It's a series of loosely connected anecdotes drawn from Hedwig's life that are both surreal and debaucherous. She's gorging on gummy bears in a ditch by the Berlin Wall, discovering Lou Reed while locked in an oven, or recounting her botched gender-affirming surgery in graphic detail. But it's not a cohesive storyline that propels Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It's vibes, and Hedwig herself. Seann Miley Moore is transcendent as our glamour goddess, achieving the perfect balance of taboo-flouting confidence, unpredictability and thinly-veiled fragility in between high kicks, soaring top notes and horny audience ad libs. As her husband, the retired drag queen Yitzhak, Adam Noviello offers a soulful counterpoint: brooding, pissy, stoic. Noviello's operatic vibrato and Moore's buttery tone combine beautifully to fill the Athenaeum Theatre to overflowing. The vibe, meanwhile, resembles that propulsive brand of chaos you find drunk at an impromptu four am drag show – all sweat, screams and in-cast fighting underscored to a pub-rock backbeat (and the occasionally eerie theremin from expert music director, Victoria Falconer). It is refreshing to see a show that avoids the trap many other revivals of queer theatrical classics fall into by leaning into its transgressiveness instead of a nostalgia-heavy approach that would relegate it to being a mere artefact of a recent past. Co-directors Shane Anthony and Dino Dimitriadis have worked hard to faithfully replicate the show's underground origins for the mainstage, leaving its essential edge intact. We're clapping along to Hedwig's anthem for sugar daddies or watching a group of unsuspecting audience members don blonde wigs to join in on the chorus of 'Wig in a Box'. Even tropes like glitter bombs and balloon drops feel intimate in their immersiveness. Moore also never shies away from Hedwig's flaws, whether via her morally dubious actions or jarring ad libs. In a world as risk-adverse as mainstage musical theatre, her thornier characteristics – matched by equally unbridled design and direction – make for a show that feels authentic and even quietly radical. We talk a lot about the mainstreaming of queer culture these days. Look! There's a Pride flag shirt at Target, another off-shoot of Ru Paul's Drag Race, another green-lit Ryan Murphy series or another cop at Mardi Gras. We should be critical of connecting political progress with Absolut Vodka bottles covered in rainbow flags, or a floating shark decked out in Pride colours. But there hasn't been a rainbow-coloured corporate wave for Pride this year, or even a tepid ripple. Late last month J.K. Rowling created an organisation dedicated to offering legal funding designed to support transphobia. This week there's the possibility of a Pride march in Tel Aviv while Palestinians are murdered in line waiting for aid. SqueezeBox has been closed for years. I do not mean to imply that this production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch is somehow politically radical or world changing. It's not going to force us marching into the streets to protest queer freedoms – to throw new 'bricks' in defence of new 'Stonewalls'. But it did have nearly 880 people laughing at Moore doing an impression of an owl as they treated Rowling's transphobia with all the ridiculousness it deserves. It did end with us leaping to our feet to applaud a cast of gender-diverse people telling a story of connection and identity that began more than thirty years ago in a small club somewhere on the margins. Where this production succeeds is in making us believe that Hedwig Schmidt would at least lead us outside and hand us a brick – and that we'd have cause, mixed with a healthy dose of punk-like anger, to throw it with her.
San Francisco Chronicle
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Symphony presents ‘Blackstar Symphony,' Bowie's final masterpiece reimagined
When David Bowie released 'Blackstar' on Jan. 8, 2016, his 69th birthday, it was instantly hailed as a bold genre-defying achievement for the rock 'n' roll legend. Infused with experimental jazz, poetic lyrics and an emotional bareness, it became one of the most critically acclaimed albums of his career. Then just two days later, Bowie died of liver cancer, which he had secretly been battling for 18 months. His death suddenly turned 'Blackstar' into a swan song, lending tracks like 'Lazarus' — a reference to the biblical figure resurrected by Jesus — added poignancy. John Cameron Mitchell, star and creator of the Bowie-referencing hit rock musical 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch,' called the album Bowie's 'mausoleum.' 'There's a gorgeousness, but there's a darkness,' said Mitchell. 'When he gets emotional, you feel like it's raw sentiment. It's kind of shocking when it comes from him because he's so unsentimental.' While some of the album's songs were incorporated into Bowie's 2015 off-Broadway musical 'Lazarus,' starring Michael C. Hall, Bowie never had a chance to perform the 'Blackstar' material live. But nearly a decade later, the album has found a life onstage. Coming to the San Francisco Symphony on Thursday-Friday, June 26-27, 'Blackstar Symphony' transforms Bowie's final album into a live performance by a 65-piece orchestra and members of the original 'Blackstar' band. In addition to the seven tracks on 'Blackstar,' the evening — timed to LGBTQ Pride weekend — will also include songs from the queer cultural icon's catalog like 'Space Oddity,' 'Life on Mars,' 'Heroes' and 'Life on Mars?' Mitchell, Bowie's longtime bassist and singer Gail Ann Dorsey and singer-songwriter David Poe take Bowie's place on lead vocals. 'I know this project is something that he would have liked,' said Dorsey, who began working with Bowie in 1995 during his Outside Tour. 'When I first heard the orchestrations, I could just see him smiling.' 'Blackstar Symphony,' which premiered at the Charlotte International Arts Festival in 2022, was conceived by Santa Clara-born musician and bandleader Donny McCaslin, who played saxophone on 'Blackstar.' (He noted the band working on the album knew Bowie was in treatment for cancer, 'but that was the extent of it.') After Bowie died, McCaslin said the band had offers to perform over the years, but declined out of respect. It wasn't until a conversation with conductor Jules Buckley that he began to imagine 'Blackstar' with a full orchestra. 'It was really the idea of the record being like the DNA and the blueprint for the orchestra project, but that the orchestra is really intentionally included in the writing,' said McCaslin, who serves as the artistic director of 'Blackstar Symphony,' with the work orchestrated by Buckley, orchestra leader and composer Maria Schneider, and longtime Bowie producer Tony Visconti, among others. 'When it's at its zenith, you hear the orchestra, the band and the singers all commingling.' Nearly everyone McCaslin tapped for 'Blackstar Symphony' has deep connections to Bowie. Dorsey, for instance, performed on his albums 'Earthling' (1997), 'Heathen' (2002), 'Reality' (2003) and 'The Next Day' (2013). She also famously sang Freddie Mercury's part on the duet 'Under Pressure' with Bowie on tour. Though she's collaborated with Boy George, the Indigo Girls, Ani DiFranco and Lenny Kravitz, among other musicians, Dorsey said nothing in her career compares to her two-decade partnership with Bowie. Working with Bowie, she said, was like 'going to school, in the best possible way.' In her years touring with him, Dorsey also recalled that Bowie had a specific ritual on his days off: 'If there was a historic bookstore — something that wasn't just a Barnes & Noble — we would go.' 'Every time I came to San Francisco with David, we went to City Lights,' Dorsey added, referring to the storied shop in North Beach. For Mitchell, his first memory of Bowie was seeing him on television in Scotland singing 'Jean Genie' on the BBC show 'Top of the Pops' in the early 1970s 'It was very intense and scary,' Mitchell recalled. 'He was so masculine and feminine and lizard-like and everything all at once without any winks or jokes. Some of the other glam (rock) people were kind of like, 'I'm in makeup, but I'm a straight guy.' And this was like, 'No, I'm an alien.'' Years later, after the 2001 release of the film adaptation of 'Hedwig,' Mitchell said Bowie asked him if he was interested in adapting his 1972 concept album 'Ziggy Stardust' into a stage show. 'But I was just burned out on rock 'n' roll,' Mitchell said. 'I do regret not looking into that now because, obviously, it's too late.' For some Bowie fans, 'Blackstar' remains a difficult album to revisit as it's so closely tied to the artist's death. McCaslin admits it was true for him for several years. But now that time has passed, he believes audiences are ready to engage with the music again in a new light. 'There's a real attention to honoring the spirit that he led with when we do this, a humility that we approach this with and a deep and abiding love for him,' said McCaslin. But 'I think he would have been into this direction, where we try to create a new piece of art with 'Blackstar.''
The Age
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘She just conjured electricity': Celebrating Divinyls legend Chrissy Amphlett
Before Madonna talked sex and sexuality on stage, a working-class girl on the other side of the globe was shocking audiences with her fierce and powerful performances. Chrissy Amphlett was unlike anything Australians had seen when she burst on the stage in 1980 as lead singer of Divinyls. Without her it's hard to imagine Amy Taylor from Amyl & the Sniffers, or Amphlett's fellow Geelong-born rocker Adalita. A new show opening next week called Amplified showcases the work of the late artist – Amphlett died from breast cancer in 2013, aged just 53 – as well as her extraordinary impact and legacy. Making the work has been a wonderful process, says Sheridan Harbridge, who stars in the show, and co-created it with acclaimed director Sarah Goodes and musical director Glenn Moorhouse (Hedwig and the Angry Inch). Trawling through YouTube and watching old performances by the Divinyls and Amphlett solo, Harbridge says there are hundreds of comments from people writing things such as 'I saw them at the Crystal Ballroom and it was the most amazing thing I've ever seen'. 'And then women saying, 'I'd never seen a woman act like that and I didn't know you could',' the actor-singer-writer says, adding that 'equally for men, they were watching something quite electric'. 'I spoke to someone who worked with her and they said, 'she just conjured electricity'.' Raised in a Pentecostal Christian family in Gippsland, Harbridge wasn't allowed to watch shows like The Simpsons and The Golden Girls, but thankfully her mum didn't know what Rage was, so that was where she first came across Amphlett.
Sydney Morning Herald
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘She just conjured electricity': Celebrating Divinyls legend Chrissy Amphlett
Before Madonna talked sex and sexuality on stage, a working-class girl on the other side of the globe was shocking audiences with her fierce and powerful performances. Chrissy Amphlett was unlike anything Australians had seen when she burst on the stage in 1980 as lead singer of Divinyls. Without her it's hard to imagine Amy Taylor from Amyl & the Sniffers, or Amphlett's fellow Geelong-born rocker Adalita. A new show opening next week called Amplified showcases the work of the late artist – Amphlett died from breast cancer in 2013, aged just 53 – as well as her extraordinary impact and legacy. Making the work has been a wonderful process, says Sheridan Harbridge, who stars in the show, and co-created it with acclaimed director Sarah Goodes and musical director Glenn Moorhouse (Hedwig and the Angry Inch). Trawling through YouTube and watching old performances by the Divinyls and Amphlett solo, Harbridge says there are hundreds of comments from people writing things such as 'I saw them at the Crystal Ballroom and it was the most amazing thing I've ever seen'. 'And then women saying, 'I'd never seen a woman act like that and I didn't know you could',' the actor-singer-writer says, adding that 'equally for men, they were watching something quite electric'. 'I spoke to someone who worked with her and they said, 'she just conjured electricity'.' Raised in a Pentecostal Christian family in Gippsland, Harbridge wasn't allowed to watch shows like The Simpsons and The Golden Girls, but thankfully her mum didn't know what Rage was, so that was where she first came across Amphlett.
Sydney Morning Herald
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
In a show for misfits, Seann Miley Moore revels in the power of Hedwig
In the hot, humid almost subterranean sweatiness of an Adelaide summer's night, actor and singer Seann Miley Moore has jumped from the stage of wild rock-fuelled musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch mid-show to prowl the audience aisles. It's a full-house. Rows of perspiring people, many rhapsodically seat-dancing to the live five-piece stage band's performance of the show's thrashing score, some jiggling in blonde wigs and bejewelled denim similar to Miley Moore's costume and wide croissant-like tresses, implore them to come their way. As the show's lead, the East German genderqueer character Hedwig, who has asked us, 'How did some slip of a girlyboy from communist East Berlin become the internationally ignored song stylist barely standing before you?' in the show's opening monologue, Moore accepts their pleas. 'Honey,' they say, leaning towards one person dressed in tight gauzy black. They jump to standing. Miley Moore leans closer. Suddenly, a pash, long and deep and entirely unplanned for the audience member, ensues between them. The crowd roars. Miley Moore purrs a guttural 'Whoo!' and the show pulses on. Such is the stage-spilling, passion-inducing and tune-throbbingly raw spectacle of the new Australian production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, produced by GWB Entertainment and Andrew Henry Presents and heading for Melbourne and Sydney after its premiere at the 2025 Adelaide Festival. The next morning, Miley Moore, fresh from a lunch with the South Australian governor, and licking a green ice block in 40-degree heat, says such spontaneous performer-audience moments (Hedwig fans are so passionate they have their own name – 'Hedheads') are to be expected in the show's three-city season. 'That's the power of Hedwig, honey, the power of the wig,' they say. 'They're breathing it all in.' Miley Moore, a contestant on The Voice who went on to star in Miss Saigon, says they are connected heart and soul to the live concert nature of this highly immersive production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. 'It's absolute pride and power up there,' they say. 'It's a rock 'n' roll show, a pride show. It is music. The audience are involved. I'm involved. It's hot and heavy in there. You absolutely feel it. It's been exhilarating, confronting as all hell up there and just such a transformative experience for me. 'This show is an absolute beacon of liberation. It's a trailblazer of queer cinema, queer musical theatre. It's a beacon of such queer spirit, non-binary spirit, trans spirit, of someone finding their true selves. 'It's an absolute liberation for the person you're meant to be in this world.' With text by John Cameron Mitchell and lyrics by Stephen Trask, Hedwig and the Angry Inch – born from a character created in downtown New York clubs in the 1990s and known for a cult 2001 movie (also starring Mitchell) – debuted as a musical off Broadway in 1998. Productions have run in almost 20 countries since, including a multi-Tony Award-winning 2014 Broadway show starring Neil Patrick Harris and, more recently, Mitchell's stripped back 2019 production, The Origin of Love Tour: The Songs and Stories of Hedwig, which they also starred in. In Australia Hedwig and the Angry Inch premiered in 2006, with iOTA winning several awards in the lead role. An aborted 2020 production was to have starred Hugh Sheridan. Blending punk, blues, heavy metal and rock 'n roll, the musical is Hedwig telling her story. Forced into botched gender reassignment surgery as a way to marry an American soldier and flee Berlin, she is left with a dysfunctional mound of flesh, the 'angry inch' (described as having 'a scar running down it like a sideways grimace on an eyeless face' in the musical's song Angry Inch). When we meet Hedwig she is performing a low-rent gig with her band, The Angry Inch, as the US concert tour of rock star Tommy Gnosis plays nearby (heard when Hedwig opens a door on-set). Gnosis collaborated musically with Hedwig before fame (his success comes from those songs) and began a relationship, but he has abandoned her. Aiding Hedwig during her tour is a surly Croatian Jewish drag queen, Yitzhak, played by Adam Noviello, with whom she has a toxic co-dependency. Noviello, who has a long-term love for the film and musical, sees himself in its themes. 'To me, the show, film and the character of Hedwig have always represented the in-betweenness of human beings and of gender, music and expression,' they say. 'Personally, I feel like I've spent my whole career and my whole life on that spectrum. 'The misfits, the losers, we've always felt like that growing up and in our careers.' Seann Miley Moore 'Hedwig is one of those rare beauties of a role where as gender-diverse people, and as trans people and as artists, we see ourselves. She represents our otherness and our fabulousness and our traumas and our battles. So, she's a very big deal for us.' Miley Moore agrees by singing from the song Midnight Radio in the show's finale. ' The misfits, the losers, we've always felt like that growing up and in our careers,' they say. 'But, to do it in this, it's two queens colliding and queer excellence on that stage and we both feel absolute pride and power up there. 'And we're both Scorpios so it's hot.' The musical's songs, from Wig in a Box to Tear Me Down, The Wicked Inch and The Origin of Love, lead much of the show, swinging from full body guttural rock to heart-rending emotional sorrow. In Adelaide's aptly named Queens Theatre, Midnight Radio soars to its ending – ' All the misfits, and the losers/Well you know you're rock and rollers/Spinning to your rock and roll/Lift up your hands ' – bringing some audience members to tears while waving their arms in the warm muggy air. This physical connection to Hedwig begins long before the show's ruched powder blue circular curtain rises above the stage. In Adelaide, a whole trailer park, with wooden refreshment booths under lines of pegged washing, was built outside the theatre as a nod to Hedwig's on-tour life living in a mobile home between gigs. Audience members could visit her caravan, filled with personal effects and memorabilia, before watching a pre-show bar show. Co-directors Shane Anthony and Dino Dimitriadis say this set-up – also planned for Melbourne and Sydney venues – is about transcending boundaries of audience, cast and the stage. 'The show feels big in its themes, big in its appeal to love, big in its appeal to identity and self-searching, big in its appeal to cultures and across different continents,' Anthony says. 'We wanted to make that concrete for the audience, both in the immersive experience provided before the show, but also inside the venue.' Anthony, who vividly recalls seeing the 2014 Broadway production starring Harris, believes Hedwig and the Angry Inch affects people deeply whoever they are. 'It lands in your DNA in a really exciting way,' he says. 'It hits you. You don't immediately understand it, but it taps into something that's more transcendent, more universal, more about the human condition. 'John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask have created something that mines truth and authenticity with characters in a way that perhaps a lot of musicals don't,' he says. 'It's about searching for love and it's done in an incredibly poetic way. 'Those songs are poems. They're explosive, they're dynamic, and I think they resonate with any audience member who's wanting to find love.' As their ice-blocks melt and the sun beats on in Adelaide, Miley Moore and Noviello echo Anthony's words. 'As much as the show is built to and will empower the queer community, it's absolutely a universal story,' Noviello says. 'So much of Hedwig's journey has her caught in a cycle of abuse and now she decides to end that. 'As the show progresses, she's choosing goodness, she's choosing wholeness and choosing love going forward and that's all of our story. We all have to make that decision within ourselves to lead with love and kindness. It's not taught to everyone. 'As much as Hedwig is for queer folks, her story is absolutely for everyone.' Miley Moore lets out a whoop before licking drips of ice-block off their arm. 'And who doesn't love rock and roll baby?' they say. 'Whatever the temperature is, hot or cold, we're dealing with all the elements, all the emotions in there.' They mime a lingering kiss. 'On and off the stage.'
