John Cameron Mitchell is bringing his cult-classic creation Hedwig back to Los Angeles for two nights, marking 25 years since the film version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch premiered. The 25th Anniversary Movie Tour, dubbed Hedwig 25, stops at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre on West 8th Street on September 17 and 18, with each show starting at 7 p.m. and tickets starting at $83.50.
The stop is part of a run built around a 4K screening of the film followed by live conversation, an audience Q&A, and an intimate acoustic performance, according to the Los Angeles Daily News. The 4K print itself traces back to a director-approved restoration that Mitchell supervised with cinematographer Frank G. DeMarco, released by The Criterion Collection in June 2019, as TheaterMania reported at the time. That physical release also included new cast and crew conversations and archival special features. Along the tour, fans can enter a pre-screening costume contest with prizes sponsored by Criterion and The Punk Rock Museum, per The Parkway Theater, with attendees encouraged to dress as Hedwig or channel looks inspired by Mitchell's broader work.
A Genderqueer Survivor's Long Road From Berlin to Broadway
Hedwig Robinson, the character at the center of it all, is a genderqueer East German singer fronting a fictional rock band who undergoes a botched gender reassignment surgery, according to the Daily News. Mitchell told the paper that Hedwig is about forcing people into the gender binary and recovering through self-invention, and he has said Hedwig is as much of a monster as Mama Rose. He set out, per the same account, to craft something out of the rage of the aids epidemic, and has said queerness has always been part of theater.
The show was created in 1998 and debuted Off-Broadway in the late 1990s, where it built what the Daily News describes as a very strong cult audience and won the Obie Award and Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Musical. The Off-Broadway run unfolded inside the Jane Street Theatre, a Greenwich Village hotel ballroom that once housed survivors of the 1912 Titanic disaster, according to the Los Angeles Times. Fans of that original staging came to call themselves “Hed Heads,” the paper noted. Mitchell and Trask themselves believed Broadway was unlikely, and Mitchell has said it was American Idiot that first made him think Hedwig could actually get there.
Bowie's Money, a Belasco Triumph, and Several Tony Awards
David Bowie, whose 1970s glam-rock era heavily shaped the musical's sound, personally invested $150,000 to co-produce the show's Los Angeles premiere at the Henry Fonda Theatre in 1999, the Times reported. Music and lyrics for Hedwig and the Angry Inch were credited to Stephen Trask, and the score drew audible influence from Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and John Lennon, per the Daily News. When Hedwig finally reached Broadway in 2014 at the Belasco Theatre, sixteen years after its Off-Broadway premiere, it won four Tony Awards from eight nominations, including Best Revival of a Musical, Best Actor in a Leading Role for Neil Patrick Harris, and Best Featured Actress for Lena Hall, according to the Times. The production was also nominated for Best Costume Design for a Musical. Mitchell has said the Broadway staging wasn't as scary to audiences as he expected.
The film adaptation, which Mitchell wrote, directed, and starred in, won both the Best Director Award and the Audience Award at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, per the Sundance Institute. Mitchell had developed the screenplay through the 1999 Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Directors Labs. Costume designer Arianne Phillips worked on that original 2001 film, and after its Broadway debut, Hedwig launched its first U.S. national tour in California in October 2016 at San Francisco's Golden Gate Theatre, Hoodline previously reported, with Darren Criss in the title role.
A Canceled Australian Run and a Debate Over Representation
Not every stop on Hedwig's global journey has gone smoothly. Mitchell has said a 2020 Australian production was canceled after young nonbinary and trans people petitioned against a cisgender gay man playing the role, per his account to the Daily News. The Sydney Festival staging was postponed after a petition protested the casting of cisgender actor Hugh Sheridan, and Mitchell and Trask argued that Hedwig was not a trans character. The episode remains a touchstone in ongoing arguments over how the show's identity should be read and staged today.
Punk Instincts and an Unanswered Call to Rosalía
Mitchell told the Daily News he believes there is still real creativity in the current music industry and that artists can build a new kind of punk outside existing systems. He named Amyl and the Sniffers, Wyld Chyld, and Thwack! as potential collaborators, with Thwack! fronted by Charlie Wood, who is trans. Mitchell also said he is mesmerized by Rosalía.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Mitchell attributed reduced sexual activity among young people partly to excessive online pornography and argued that sex has gotten worse in American society, tying the shift to how digital culture influences sexual behavior. On a warmer note, he told the paper he meets people affected by Hedwig in nearly every town he visits, describing the show's audience as a worldwide community that has followed the character for a quarter century.
Inside a Los Angeles Landmark With Its Own Wild History
The venue hosting this leg of the tour has a backstory almost as colorful as the show itself. The Wilshire Ebell Theatre is the setting for these performances.
Its stage carries its own legends.
