There’s Something About Hedwig

On Valentine’s Day last year, when “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” opened here, much was made of the fact that the new rock musical was premiering at a theater carved out of the tattered ballroom of a hotel that had once housed survivors of the Titanic. Altogether appropriate, many scribes wrote in their glowing reviews, because “Hedwig,” the “internationally ignored” rock diva at the center of the 95-minute confessional concert, is nothing if not a survivor.

But since that modest debut, she has done more than survive. Much to everyone’s surprise, “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” has flourished, evolving into one of the most unlikely successes in recent theatrical history. The musical is a downtown phenomenon in New York that has earned critical acclaim, multiple honors and a band of cult followers who call themselves “Hed Heads.” After playing nearly 20 months at the Jane Street Theatre, where Jane Street meets the Hudson River in Greenwich Village, she is beginning to spread her wings, opening productions in Boston and Cologne, with more planned for Berlin and Vienna. And on Sunday--Halloween, fittingly--the show officially opens at the Henry Fonda Theatre in Hollywood, bringing Hedwig’s outrageous acid-washed glamour to Tinseltown under the auspices, in part, of David Bowie, who has invested $150,000 in the L.A. production.

She is already celebrated on an Atlantic original cast album. And this spring, a New Line film version of the show will begin production, quite a distinction given the almost moribund state of movie musicals.

All this for an East German-born girly-boy, one of the most marginal and powerless of creatures. To be more explicit, the story of the angry inch is the story of Hedwig, born Hansel, a victim of a botched sex change operation.

Ouch.

The reality of that inch of flesh would make most people run for cover, locking the door behind them. But Hedwig is the type of girl who takes an inch and makes a mile out of it, as we learn in the course of the show, which takes the form of a rock concert in which Hedwig, the singer, is backed by a band called--what else?--the Angry Inch. She is not about to take anything lying down. Not her East German communist childhood, not her abandonment in a Kansas trailer park by Luther, her American GI husband, not her scandalous love affair with rock’s greatest icon, Tommy Gnosis. She is out to prove to the world that, in her case at least, smaller can be bigger. And audiences have responded.

“When people first enter the theater, you can sense them thinking, ‘What kind of a freak show have I come to?,’ ” says Michael Cerveris, the Broadway actor (“The Who’s Tommy,” “Titanic”) who played Hedwig in New York for a year and who will star in the Los Angeles production. “But as Hedwig’s mask begins to slip and she becomes one of the walking wounded, people start to recognize and identify with her sense of loss, of abandonment, the need to be loved and appreciated. Hedwig’s not an alien, but somebody who’s not unlike them, and they start to relax. The tougher the audience, the more fun it is to win them over.”

Hedwig started as a whimsical experiment--a glam-rock musical inspired by the philosophical tract “Plato’s Symposium,” of all things--and in its confessional narrative it owes as much to the musical style of Chuck Berry and Bruce Springsteen as it does to Courtney Love, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry and Yoko Ono.

Though the show’s success invariably draws comparisons to “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “Rent” and “The Who’s Tommy,” “Hedwig” was conceived by composer Stephen Trask and actor John Cameron Mitchell--who created the role of Hedwig on stage--as a satiric assault on the notion of what a rock musical should be. Though Mitchell, 36, comes from a traditional theater background (“Big River,” “Secret Garden”), Trask, 33, had had no previous theater experience and is best known for heading the independent rock group Cheater. He also has created avant-garde dance scores while acting as music director of the Squeeze Box, the New York alternative downtown drag club where Hedwig was developed.

“It’s not foreign to rock music that a story is told from beginning to end; I like that narrative drive, and that’s what drew John to me,” says Trask, who will be performing in Los Angeles for the first month of the run as a member of the Angry Inch. “But, for me, songwriting takes precedence over any desire to create theater.”

“Rock on stage had always been submerged, diluted,” says Mitchell. “Stephen and I wanted to give people a sense of discovery that we’d never been able to find in the theater but had been able to in music, like Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ or David Bowie or Lou Reed or Iggy Pop. [Hedwig] was sort of a big ‘screw you’ to the people who were dictating what theater should be about. We wanted to do something that was authentic rock and authentic theater.”

They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Rolling Stone hailed the piece as the “first rock musical that truly rocks.” Time called it the “most exciting hard-rock score written for the theater since, oh, maybe ever.”

Question: How Well Will the Show Travel?

But as “Hedwig” begins its national and international expansion, the question becomes how well the show will travel and how best to market to a potential audience that might be forgiven for thinking a musical about a mutilated Teutonic drag queen is not the best idea for a great night out.

Despite raves from New York critics, the show’s momentum grew only slowly, eventually attracting a wide demographic of teens, yuppies, Broadway queens, never-caught-dead-in-theater straights and celebrity admirers, including Marilyn Manson, Michael Stipe, Glenn Close and Bowie, who, in his Ziggy Stardust days, was among the first to glory in glam theatricality.

And the show’s recent history points to some fragility in the franchise. The Boston production will close Nov. 7, after six weeks, reportedly losing $600,000. And when actress Ally Sheedy recently opened in New York in the title role of Hedwig--the first time a woman has played the part--it was to poor reviews, although box-office receipts are as good as ever, according to the New York producers. In New York the show continues to gross about $40,000 to $50,000 a week, respectable for an off-Broadway 260-seat house, particularly after a nearly two-year run.

“You can’t market this show as a traditional theater piece; it appeals initially to the very young, hip, and you have to go out and get them and make it affordable for them,” says L.A.-based Jim Freydberg, one of the New York producers. “In New York, the traditional musical theater audience came only much later, after the show was established. It’s a show that’s always stuck out its neck, saying, ‘Come see me and if you don’t like it, tough.’ It will take the same kind of bold moves to get an audience wherever it plays.”

Veteran L.A. producers Joan Stein and Susan Dietz, of Canon Theatricals, are behind the engagement at the Fonda, and they clearly are aware of the challenges.

Aggressive Marketing on College Campuses

“It’s not ‘The Lion King,’ ” says Dietz, quoting David Letterman on “Hedwig,” and noting that Canon marketing techniques are aggressively targeting local college campuses, clubs and various venues of L.A.’s music scene in tandem with more traditional approaches. Though the $55 top ticket price struck one theater veteran as high (New York’s is $49.50), the producers, a la “Rent,” are also offering at each performance 22 tickets at $22 and a Friday night late show $32 ticket.

“We’re focusing on both grass-roots marketing, flyering clubs, as well as direct mail because we believe that the ‘Hedwig’ audience is made up of both the kid with a spike through her tongue next to a guy in a suit,” Dietz says. “It has the power to bridge the gap between all those classes.”

Key to the success of Canon’s campaign to reach the youth market will be the ability to cut through the bias that anything smacking of musical theater is unhip, especially prevalent in L.A.’s music scene. Bowie’s name above the title as producer helps. Not only does it give “Hedwig” credibility in rock circles, says Stein, it also gives the producers access to the rock icon’s sophisticated presence on the Internet. “David’s very involved with the show, and he’ll be promoting ‘Hedwig’ on his Web site, setting up a live Internet press conference, on-line chats and coordinating with our own Web site,” says the producer.

Stone Temple Pilots Stood In at Concert

A rock group that has lent credibility to “Hedwig” is the Stone Temple Pilots, who stood in for the Angry Inch in a promotional concert for the show at Vynyl last month. Cerveris, as Hedwig, and the L.A. incarnation of the Angry Inch have also played sets at such L.A. venues as the Roxy, following a template used in New York to build a following in clubs for the show. Last New Year’s Eve, for example, Cerveris and New York’s Angry Inch were the opening act for Boy George and Culture Club at Radio City Music Hall.

Cerveris also once led his own band and toured, playing guitar and singing backup for Bob Mould. The sort of new cross-fertilization between theater and rock apparently works well for both the show and the performers. “Out of the 4,000 or 5,000 that were there for Culture Club, maybe 500 had seen the show,” says Cerveris. “The rest just thought of us as some bizarre transvestite glam-rock band.”

Hoped-for hit singles off the original cast album never materialized, however, much to the surprise of many who think of Trask’s songs as the most accessible to radio play of any recent theater piece. According to Ron Shapiro, a vice president at Atlantic Records, about 25,000 albums have sold, largely in New York. He expects that record sales will follow in cities where “Hedwig” plays, but he sees the record label’s commitment to the show in the long term, expecting sales eventually to top 100,000, an acceptable figure for brand-new artists.

“We were eager to get involved with these guys [Trask and Mitchell] even though Broadway shows have incredible odds against them in the music world,” Shapiro says. “We felt here was a powerful theatrical experience which also had incredible music, something very rare to find in the theater.”

Shapiro was not surprised that the album has so far received no exposure on the airwaves, given that contemporary American radio is extremely resistant to music from the theater.

Though New Line will be following the progress of “Hedwig” in Los Angeles, Amy Henkels, vice president of production, maintains, “We’re not looking to the launching [in L.A.] to justify our making of the movie. There’s no question in any of our minds right up to the top, to Bob Shaye and Mike DeLuca, that Hedwig was unlike anything we’d seen in a really long time, so totally fantastic and so campy and fun and yet packing an emotional wallop. It’s not often that you get such an unusual story, which also manages to be universal at the same time. We think it provides a great opportunity to revive the film musical.”

Taking a Chance on Neophyte Director

In fact, New Line has enough confidence in the property to take a chance on Mitchell as a neophyte director. The production, reported to cost $3.5 million, is expected to start filming this spring, with Mitchell in the starring role. Trask is expected to write at least half a dozen more songs for the film, which will show the events in Hedwig’s life that are only recounted in her club act.

“What’s great about the L.A. [stage] production is that it will heighten people’s familiarity through a production that, because of the involvement of the original creative team, protects the integrity of the work,” says Henkels. “They’ll see it in its purest form.” Indeed, both Trask and Mitchell feel that the key to that integrity is to maintain the intimacy of the show, what Cerveris describes as “the close collusion between the performer and the audience that is an active partner in creating the event.” Curiously, Mitchell feels that, as the show enjoys more and more success, the more endangered that relationship becomes. He, for one, is glad that there have been no hit singles to come out of the show.

“I want the album to do well, and I believe it will,” he says, “but I prefer to be the ugly kid on the block, to be discovered rather than having to ram ourselves down people’s throats. As it expands, it becomes harder to keep it pure. Even at the Jane Street Theatre, with 260 seats, we weren’t selling out every night. And there’s never been a master plan. ‘Hedwig’ has always taken things as they came, one step at a time.”

“There used to be a definition of hip as good or bad,” he says. “It was William Burroughs or David Bowie, but then the meaning seemed to change in the ‘80s to mean popular. I hope we’re hip in the former way, good or bad.

“I like being a cult figure. It’s hard when you’re huge. You’re scrutinized and over-analyzed. We haven’t really had a backlash because we haven’t overstepped what we are. And I hope we don’t ever.”

BE THERE

“Hedwig and the Angry Inch” at the Henry Fonda Theatre, 6126 Hollywood Blvd., (310) 859-2830. Wednesdays and Thursdays, 8 p.m.; Fridays, 8 and 11 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Jan. 31. $22 to $55.