Audiences at The Gladstone theatre will get to go on a musical quest for “The Origin of Love” with Vanity Project Productions’ Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
The musical is an evening with East German transgender rock-goddess Hedwig, played by Tim Oberholzer, and her band, The Angry Inch. Framed by the band’s performance, Hedwig tells her story – how she was once Hansel, how she fell in love with an American soldier and planned to cross into West Germany and how everything fell apart at the same time as the fall of the Berlin Wall. All of this and a botched sex change that leaves her with a one-inch mound of flesh between her legs – her angry inch.
Hedwig is one of many stories with a musical angle that Oberholzer, an Ottawa actor and the show’s producer, says aren’t staged enough. He says that’s one of the reasons he started Vanity Project Productions last spring.
Launching his own production company, Oberholzer says, was a great opportunity for him to self-produce work that he enjoys, and allows him to work in styles that he thinks are effective.
“I’ve always been really interested in musical theatre as an art form,” Oberholzer says. But, like Hedwig, the first production the company put on wasn’t a musical in the traditional sense.
The Vanity Project’s production, which debuted at the Ottawa Fringe Festival last June, was a kind of hybrid between a concert and a piece of theatre.
When it came out in 1998, Hedwig was ahead of its time, Oberholzer says. But with a greater societal emphasis today on gender issues and equality for the trans community, he says it’s a great time to revisit a story like this.
Rebecca Noelle, who plays Hedwig’s sometimes-love interest Yitzhak, says she’s happy there are shows such as Hedwig which might not follow the traditional “they-fall-in-love type of shows.”
Although some theatregoers might not be ready for a show like this, Noelle says she thinks that more conservative audiences are beginning to enjoy productions like Hedwig.
“The people who aren’t used to seeing it are getting that kind of rush of adrenaline,” she says. “Like, ‘Ooh, I’m watching something naughty,’ and it’s OK.”
Hedwig and the Angry Inch runs April 3-5 at The Gladstone.