The acclaimed, Tony Award-winning revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which originally debuted off-Broadway in 1998 and then became a cult film in 2001, has been fueled by the punk-ish charisma of its star Neil Patrick Harris. (The show now stars Book of Mormon’s Andrew Rannells.) A story that was too controversial for the Great White Way 16 years ago — a rocker flees East Berlin by becoming transgender and marrying a U.S. military officer, comes to America, and falls for future rock star Tommy Gnosis, who eventually takes their songs and abandons her for a life of fame and fortune — is very timely now.
The show’s bluster and brashness is a cover for the pathos and poignancy that lurk within the autobiographical story that Hedwig tells the audience between her band’s bombastic numbers. She occasionally opens a stage door to hear Gnosis’ concert next door and bristles at his self-involved stage patter. Ultimately her tale is one of identity, rejection, and self acceptance in spite of harrowing circumstances.
Akey element in this spirited revival is the scenic work of Julian Crouch, who actually designed a different show than the one onstage. That description might sound a bit cryptic, but the updated conceit of this production is that Hedwig has only managed to make it to Broadway for one night by playing on the stage of the failed musical version of The Hurt Locker, which opened the day before and closed by intermission. The stage is strewn with the rubble of a war-torn Iraqi street, a car sitting center stage with the exploded parts of its engine hanging overhead symbolically. Fake Playbills for the fabricated musical are even tossed out to the first rows of the audience to complete the joke.
“It was fun for me,” Crouch told PLSN on the phone from Salzburg, Austria. “I got to design The Hurt Locker, really, and not Hedwig.” In contemplating how to design the set, Crouch watched the Oscar-winning film to see what was the most defining moment, and he felt that the image of an exploding car was it. With dozens of engine parts taken from a real car onstage that was found in a junkyard, it made for a striking set piece.
A Quick ROI
This revival of Hedwig reportedly made its $5 million budget back in 15 weeks, an impressive feat for the 1,000-seat Belasco Theatre, but the producers kept a tight rein on costs. Crouch, who worked previously on the big budget shows The Addams Family and Big Fish, acknowledges that his third Broadway production was very different from those others. And the advantage this show had was that producer David Binder, lighting designer Kevin Adams and original book writer/star John Cameron Mitchell had all done the show before. (Director Michael Mayer was involved with the original off-Broadway production but had to bow out at the time due to other commitments.)
“It’s pretty low budget,” said Crouch of this incarnation. “I’m sure Neil Patrick Harris cost a little bit, but they wanted to recoup fast. I guess they were unsure of the life that it would have. We had a very, very short tech as well. It was a quarter of the time of the other shows. The fortunate thing about that was Kevin Adams knew the show inside out, every moment of every song. He’s been with it from the very beginning, so he literally did dry tech, which we had to do. I think we only had [about] five days of tech, which is very short for Broadway. Every penny that we spent is up on that stage. We knew we didn’t want to see any stage crew on the set, so, all in all, it was a minimal affair. I think we managed to get the most out of a very small expenditure, and it went very well. Michael Mayer is a very smart man as well, so working with him was very easy. I asked a lot of questions of Kevin Adams just because he had been around the show for so long, and the whole thing was really pleasant and fast and easy. It was one of those really nice jobs that worked out really well.”
In designing the set, Crouch had to take a back-to-front approach. “The proscenium arch that we have slides away to reveal a rock rig [at the end],” he explains. “I asked Cameron what he needed from the design, and he said he needed it to be like a rock concert at the end. We designed the end first, and then worked our way forwards.”
Disappearing Debris
What audiences first see when they come to the show is a set with cinderblocks dotting the front and back edges of the stage, the damaged car center stage, the exploded engine above, and the band taking either side; bass and keyboards at stage left, drums, guitar, and sideman vocalist on stage right. Hedwig naturally prowls the stage, belting out songs and cajoling the audience. As the show goes on, an interesting development occurs — the stage gets scaled down and stripped back.
The engine “shimmers a little bit because there’s a little bit of air on stage, but it’s not there for very long,” notes Crouch. “The audience sits and watches it until the show starts. For the actual show, we have to get it out of the way for projections. The whole show is slowly dismantled during the length of it, so we end up with virtually nothing on the stage. We have some Iraqi street [debris], and bit by bit it goes away.”
At the back of the stage is a brick wall where various images are projected throughout the 90-minute musical. It’s actually a fake wall with a door right in the middle — used when Hedwig occasionally goes to listen to Tommy Gnosis in a nearby theater performing for his adoring fans and omitting his past associations with his former lover — with the door placed in the middle because of sightline issues.
“At the proscenium are these cinderblocks, which is meant to be an explosion, so there’s a lot of cinderblocks and bits of wiring and metal construction,” says Crouch. “It’s like a hole has been blown in a wall. We project onto the sides a little bit but a lot onto the back wall.”
While the car is certainly an integral set piece — Hedwig and his sidekick Yitzhak perform around it, on it, and slide down it — the initial concept generated a lot of debate. As Crouch recalls, placing the car in the middle of the action meant splitting up the band, but eventually it worked as it was taken offstage later in the production and allowed the band to feel more unified. The car does allow for a quick costume change when Hedwig goes inside the front where the engine would be, squats down so only his head is visible, and jokes with the audience. Meanwhile a trap door below allows for him to make a costume change as he sings and re-emerge looking different.
A Well-Oiled Machine
Compared with Hedwig, the other Broadway shows that Crouch designed for were much harder, a fact that he attributes to being the new kid on the block here. “There were a lot of people with a great deal of knowledge and a lot of opinions, and they were all very smart,” he remarks. “In a sense, it was different because often you might run and fight for an idea [in a show], and here I was very aware that I’d been asked to a dinner party and felt like a guest. It was a slight challenge of balancing my own opinion against people who’d been around that show for much longer. It wasn’t bad. There were some budget challenges. There is a wig wall that comes down. That was a big debate because that was a big expense for them, and there’s a lot of glitter falling at the end. I would have loved it if that could have been in the audience as well, but that couldn’t happen because of running costs. I have to say it was such a joyful process and never really felt like a challenge, to be honest, because everyone was on the ball, and we were all doing the same show.”
The aforementioned wig wall comprised four rows of five different wigs on mannequin heads flown in from above for the song “Wig In A Box,” and a display above flashed words for a sing-along during that number. The wall’s very presence precipitated debate, because as the show progresses, things are being taken away, but here something was being added, albeit temporarily. “It was as if the show was being struck, and this was the one place where we threw our whole concept out,” says Crouch. “This is like a fantasy — Hedwig couldn’t afford one of these, but let’s just bring it in for the audience. I think they forgive us.” (The other moment of something being flown is when Hedwig makes his grand entrance from up above and is flown down to the floor at the start of the show.)
In working on Hedwig, Crouch “learned that Broadway can be fun,” he says. “It’s hard work, and generally on Broadway there’s a lot of fear. People are worried about losing money [and that] their show might close. I learned that you can have a good time on Broadway, mostly because it’s a show that had a previous life. John Cameron Mitchell and [composer/lyricist] Stephen Trask and David Biden the producer and Kevin Adams have been doing this since they were really young, so it’s a labor of love. From where I come from, it was more like a Fringe production that just happened to do well on Broadway. It was done with a slightly different ethos behind it. A lot of care. That’s their baby, and it was very important to them not in terms of making money, but the show has a cult status and they didn’t want to mess up. It was interesting to work on something that people love so much.”
