Hedwig and the Angry Inch
dir. John Cameron Mitchell
Opens Fri Aug 3 at the Egyptian.

Here's a question geeks wrestle with: Do I buy the movie soundtrack or the original cast recording? As in, what's better, Tommy from 1968, or the 1975 movie version? There are at least two versions each of Cabaret, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Candide, Hair, Grease, Jesus Christ Superstar, Bye Bye Birdie, Quadrophenia, Street Scene, and West Side Story. In most cases, it's pretty easy to know which recording is definitive. For example, the 1968 version of Tommy is the correct answer. The original stage version of The Rocky Horror [Picture] Show (without Susan Sarandon!) is not.

Up until this moment, though, there has only been one instance where, in fact, you absolutely had to own both versions. As any theater fag can tell you, the 1957 original Broadway cast recording of West Side Story and the 1961 original movie soundtrack are equally required listening.

Well, now Leonard Bernstein has company: Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The 1998 original off-Broadway cast recording and the 2001 film soundtrack of John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask's glitter-punk musical are indispensable. It's not that the two recordings offer up such disparate renditions of Trask's excellent songs. It's more that both the stage and screen versions are legitimate defining moments. In other words, as opposed to the way Ken Russell's Tommy was a contrived and irrelevant spectacle (1968 was Tommy's true moment), the second version of Hedwig is--like its original stage incarnation--a cultural event in its own right.

"I really think it can do some good," Hedwig star/director/screenwriter Mitchell told me when he swung through Seattle to promote the movie earlier this summer. "If I was a little kid, the freak that I was, and I saw something this specifically bizarre when I was 16, I would feel like there was some hope."

Here's the deal on Hedwig. After New York actor/writer Mitchell and punk rock songwriter Stephen Trask debuted a cut-and-paste version of the show during drag night at a SoHo rock club, they set up shop at the Jane Street Theater in Greenwich Village in February 1998. Their Lita Ford-meets-Liberace sex-change-operation drag musical became an instant off-Broadway phenomenon. It ran through April 2000, and it won an Obie award. And by rock musical, I don't mean Rent. This is Maria Callas channeling Johnny Rotten, set to swaggering Cheap Trick electric guitar riffs. Bob Mould plays lead guitar on the movie soundtrack. In its finest musical moments, Hedwig features exquisite David Bowie-style glitter ballads. (To my delight, Mitchell told me that Hedwig's finale torch song, the perfect "Midnight Radio," was a cop on Bowie's 1974 epic "Rock 'N' Roll With Me," from the Diamond Dogs LP.) Productions of the play went up in L.A., Boston, Kansas City, and (in an extended run at Re-bar) here in Seattle.

The kooky plot is crazy beautiful, and (in a way that sneaks up on you) truly literary. "Yeah, it's a sad story," says the disarmingly soft-spoken Mitchell. (You expect something a little more crass from someone who wears garish blue eyeliner and a lifeless blond wig while belting out lyrics like, "Where my penis used to be, where my vagina never was, it was a one-inch mound of flesh!")

Hedwig is the story of Hansel, an East German boy who lives in a tiny Socialist apartment with his mom and later, all alone, in a desolate trailer park in Kansas. Hansel's woeful tale is based on Plato's discussion of "The Nature and Origin of Love," which posits that humans were originally designed sort of like Siamese twins, only to be split in half by the angry Gods above. Now, humans roam the earth searching for their other halves.

Hansel's unwieldy search involves a botched sex change operation, prostitution, Rent auditions, unrequited love, the Berlin Wall, a B-rate drunken lounge act, Adam and Eve, a sexually confused American G.I., and rock stardom.

With its charming pop-art magical realism, cinematic flashbacks, and the ability to present intimate documentary-style footage of Hedwig's misfit band on tour with their charlatan business manager (an excellent character addition), the movie version of Hedwig emphasizes the rich plot far better than the stage version did. Although, admittedly, the movie's ending--a Christlike nude walking across a city street, with a close-up on Mitchell's ass--is still wildly obscure. (I could never figure out Tommy or Rocky Horror either.)

No matter, you'll be sorry when this bright blue bubblegum ball of a movie comes to an end, and find yourself breathlessly glued to the credits, wanting more of Hedwig's sweet songs, bona fide drama, and confused joy.

Certainly, Hedwig and the Angry Inch has "midnight cult movie" written all over it, but--and this is what I mean by a musical having its own cultural "defining moment"--this weirdo movie might very well eventually walk away with more than the Sundance Film Festival Director's Award and Audience Award. Perverse and freaky as it is, this Hedwig isn't haunted by the specter of mainstream fame and glory--it practically begs for it. Mitchell knows it, too. "For me, Hedwig can't sell out enough," he bragged, "because the character is that: Hedwig wants to sell out."