Since we are talking about a punk rock musical, why not start with Plato’s Symposium ?

“Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature. Each of us, then, is a ‘matching half’ of a human whole…and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him.” [/them]

In his outstanding music theatre work, Hedwig and the Angry Inch playwright John Cameron Mitchell takes a sharply witty view of the duality in us all.

It is described, in detail, in his equally accomplished musical collaborator, Stephen Trask’s song “Origin of Love” which proposes a time when “Folks roamed the earth/ Like big rolling kegs ./They had two sets of arms./They had two sets of legs”

They also had two faces and one giant head . And they knew nothing of love. It was before the Origin of Love – when Thor and Zeus and Osiris and the mighty hand of Jove all joined to sunder these composites and they became forever more- “lonely two-legged creatures.”

This is the fabulously ludicrous mythic justification with which the lonely young boy Hansel, besieged in communist East Berlin, becomes Hedwig- his infamous, prowling, heartsick, altered ego.

Since its Off-Broadway inception in 1998, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, has, like The Rocky Horror Show, confronted the tyrannies of gender, and its binary imperatives, with defiance and a kind of raucous joy. When other Hedwig productions were cancelled in 2020 by purist agitators – for failing to meet stringent casting requirements – this latest outing boldly demonstrates that 2025 needs Hedwig’s mutinous courage more than ever.

In the ancient shell of The Queens Theatre, co-directors Shane Anthony and Dino Dimitriadis have created rough theatre with style and flair. Jeremy Allen’s set, (bathed in lighting wizard, Geoff Cobham’s artfully grungy sprays and strobes) consists of a compact, circular steel performance stage, with a staircase at the back leading to a large mysterious door. .

A silvery, ruffled, tubular fabric creation hangs above the action like a giant lampshade – ready to be lowered over the band for quieter Hedwig reveries, or scrunched up into itself for the big show tune occasions.

The excellent band is already installed, dressed in Nicol & Ford’s extravagantly distressed and patched denim, and building the expectation with slashing guitar and keyboard rock.

It is Hedwig time. Sporting a blonde Heidi wig rolled into two big bunches and a long pigtail, also in denim, fishnet, and platinum cowboy boots, is the star and engine of the show, Seann Miley Moore comes out roaring-

“Tear Me Down”.

The transgressive challenges the actual Berlin Wall and the metaphor of bourgeois disapproval. Moore’s Hedwig means business. “There isn’t much difference between a bridge and a wall/ Without me right in the middle babe/you would be nothing at all”

The songs are great. Rolling Stone magazine wrote at the time- here was a rock musical with actual rock music. Nothing lights the touchpaper like “Angry Inch” narrating the ghastly events of a gender transition operation going horribly wrong. Hence the song’s title – the tiny grim, fleshly reminder of so much lost and so little gained. Crowd favourite, Moore is not alone in bringing this weird, ambitious, crazy-brave and heroic story of resistance into the light.

As Hedwig’s devoted, but despised, paramour Yitzhak, Adam Noviello is a thin, desperate, introverted foil to the petulant extravagance of Moore, with a vocal range and presence that lifts the music literally to another level.

Crucial also to the success of this production is the band . Versatile guitarist Glenn Moorhouse, bassist Felicity Freeman, Jarrad Payne on drums – all under the exacting direction of Victoria Falconer on keyboards, and momentarily, a quivering theremin.

Hedwig’s narrative aaarrk, from bad to worse to even worser, is contrasted with the success and glory gathered by their protégé Tommy Gnosis – plagiarist and traitor to their universe of two. While Hedwig and The Inch are playing two-bit dives, the mysterious door is momentarily opened in a blizzard of stage haze to reveal Tommy playing Hedwig’s compositions to stadium crowds.

Seann Miley Moore has a large task capturing the many elements of this ambitious, thematically complex stage work. The East Berlin satire is perhaps too esoteric for present audiences and Moore’s German accent is not brisk enough for the political wit.

But armed with Stephen Trask’s brilliantly varied songs – from the melancholy of “Wig in A Box”, the country lilt of “Sugar Daddy”, and the alienated numbness of “Wicked Little Town”, Moore, Noviello and the lock-step band, have the audience entranced, energised and agog for every angry and exalted inch of Hedwig’s tour of the lower depths.

See it before it leaves town. It is a 27 year queer classic.

Presented by GWB Entertainment. Andrew Henry Presents & Adelaide Festival, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is playing at The Queen’s Theatre until March 15.

murraybramwell.com