Harlequin Productions presents Hedwig and the Angry Inch by John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask, June 24 – July 30 at the State Theater. Artistic Director Aaron Lamb will direct. Honoring Olympia’s status as a punk rock center, every weekend will feature a different local band opening the show with a 45-minute set.
The place: The State Theater. The time: The early-mid 90s. The opening act: local bands including Sugar and the Spitfires, Keven James Hoffman, Golden Ruins, and Smelly Cat. The Berlin Wall is down. Gender is a construct. Just try and tear her down. This is Hedwig in punk rock Olympia, WA.
Brilliantly innovative, heartbreaking, and wickedly funny, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is the landmark musical by John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask that is “groundbreaking and undoubtedly ahead of its time” (Entertainment Weekly). This genre-bending, fourth wall-smashing musical sensation, with a pulsing score and electrifying performances, tells the story of one of the most unique characters to ever hit the stage. Winner of four 2014 Tony Awards including Best Musical Revival, Hedwig will take you by storm!
Since its howling debut at the Jane Street Theatre in 1998, Hedwig has received countless conceptual reimagining’s. Harlequin’s production aims to take the show back to its roots. Set in the “early-mid 90s”, director Aaron Lamb’s staging recalls the era when the Capitol Theater’s backstage (one block from the State Theater) was a center for the riot girl movement and hosted international punk rock music festivals. Bringing in local bands to open the show is a part of this vision.
Lamb was there for the show’s first off-Broadway run, though he didn’t know it at the time. As he recalls, “I was a young, arrogant actor in NYC in 1998, in town for auditions. I found a room from the back of the Village Voice. It was the Jane Street Hotel in the middle of the Meatpacking District. Every night for two weeks, I came back to an obnoxious band playing very loudly in the basement of this dirty, rat-infested hole. I walked by every night with my nose in the air. That was the original production.”
With the passage of 30 years of relative global stability, the edge and danger of the period just after the fall of the Berlin Wall seems far away. Or does it? The war in Ukraine and rising violence in our own country are bringing back glimpses of that darker, more dangerous time when punk rock served as an outlet for global tensions and fear.
Says Lamb, “The more I delve into Hedwig’s story, the more I see that she was ahead of her time in 1998, and she may once again be ahead of her time today.”
Tickets are available online at harlequinproductions.org