It’s startling to realize the engaging, thrashy — and willfully trashy — musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” was workshopped 30 years ago.
Because, in 2024, you’d be hard pressed to find a more timely, socially aware entertainment. “Hedwig” is a raucous Joker for the non-binary identification age, a sharp and ironic card now well played at Chance Theater in Anaheim.
It’s an impressive trick seeing how often and well Chance finds and develops lesser-known talent. This time, with young actor/performer Tom Avery, the house deals audiences a natural ace in the key title role.
Hedwig (christened Hansel) — bitterly and caustically self-described as ”a slip of a girly boy (who) becomes the internationally ignored song stylist” — guides us for 100, intermission-free and self-obsessive moments.
Playwright John Cameron Mitchell — he played the original Hedwig and starred in the 2001 movie — has shaped a soul-searing/sneering confessional about how a botched sexual reassignment operation led the character from Communist East Berlin to mind-numbing boredom and mobile-home poverty in Junction City, Kansas.
After a wrenching encounter with a would-be rocker, events culminate at Hedwig’s opening night on stage in Anaheim’s fictional La Palma Club. The character’s failed love interest Tommy Gnosis (Greek for “knowledge”) is starring within maddening earshot of a big, stadium rock concert at Angel Stadium.
An assured and confident presence, Avery delivers an autobiographical lament-meets-rant, while fronting a band and doing vocal justice to Stephen Trask’s compelling music and lyrics in varied pop music styles. (If you know new-wave rock, there’s a good chance you’ve heard “Wig in a Box” over the decades.)
Avery’s acting characterization has the pouts, flounces and self-indulgent mood swings — always gravitating downwards — required. With nearly every other line in the first half a sly, bitter double entendre, with faux German accent, Avery smoothly and ably transitions into vacuous, American rock star-speak when assuming the — merged? — identity with resented love interest Tommy.
Meantime, Avery proves a sure and evocative front for the backing four-piece band The Angry Inch, the name itself the rueful description of the disastrous surgery result.
The group is co-led (meaning, extra verbal abuse from Hedwig) by Yitzhak, a resentful, self-sacrificing cipher played by diminutive actress Laura Herskov. Yitzak, we come to understand, is a Croatian-Jewish drag queen who previously performed under the stage name — sorry ’bout this — Krystal Nacht.
Veteran regional director Matthew McCray is back at Chance — he was the landlord overseeing last summer’s “Rent” — and he delivers all the thematic chaos with an assured hand.
Chance has outfitted the production’s club stage ambience (anybody reading recall Costa Mesa’s long-gone punk dive Cuckoo’s Nest?) with a grit that scenic designer Bradley Kaye enhances in the first third of the story with a graffiti-covered Berlin Wall circa 1989 behind the bandstand.
Costume designer Bradley Allen Lock and hair and makeup designer Kate Galleran have gone to town on the band members’ looks; Hedwig’s greasepaint likely took 25% of the production budget.
As for the show’s conclusion, well, it’s anyone’s guess just knowing what has happened (at least for this befuddled critic… maybe the title end credits should read “Hedwig and the Baffled Ink-Stained Wretch”?).
But two definite leave-no-doubts:
1) “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” Chance’s season opening show, shouts “game-on” anew.
2) Tom Avery should be on everybody’s radar.
‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’
Rating: 3 ½ stars (out of a possible 4)
When: Through Feb. 25. Regular performances: 7:30 p.m., Thursdays; 8 p.m., Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 3 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m.
Where: Chance Theater, Cripe Stage, 5522 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim
Tickets: $51-54.
Information: 888-455-4212; chancetheater.com
