Dancing with the Hedheads

Tim Mislock Peter Yankowitz Justin Craig and Matt Duncan at the Belasco Theatre April 22 2014.
Tim Mislock, Peter Yankowitz, Justin Craig, and Matt Duncan at the Belasco Theatre; April 22, 2014.Photograph by Walter McBride/WireImage

Last Thursday, at the Belasco Theatre, before a performance of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” now starring Andrew Rannells, I ran into Mike Potter, the wig and makeup designer I wrote about this spring in Talk of the Town, when “Hedwig” was still in previews. “Hedwig” was born at the drag-punk party SqueezeBox, in the mid-nineties, a collaboration between John Cameron Mitchell, who created and performed the character, and Stephen Trask, who wrote the music. Then, as now, Potter designed Hedwig’s wig and makeup; he made up Neil Patrick Harris during his entire run. That ended in August, and Potter told me that he had taken a little vacation, visiting relatives and going to the beach. He looked relaxed and refreshed, youthful in a white V-neck T-shirt, his hair very blond. “I did miss this, though,” he said, gazing toward the proscenium arch.

Potter had come back to town in part to see a midnight show by the “Hedwig” house band, which in the show is called the Angry Inch and offstage calls itself Tits of Clay. The show was at the Mercury Lounge. I was going, too. The band plays the kind of old-school New York punk that was played at SqueezeBox, and I was eager for a hint of that was like. “There are going to be special guests,” Potter said, mysteriously.

“So I hear,” I said. In August, Harris had tweeted: “Get tix to the 9/4 @TitsofClay gig at Mercury Lounge. They rule. Plus, their surprise guests are usually amazing! ;).” Harris had performed with them in the past, and this winky emoticon was as good as a Hedhead bat signal. I was curious about what would happen, just as I was curious about Andrew Rannells and the legacy of N.P.H. on Broadway. Potter made another mysterious remark: he was meeting the next Hedwig (“Him—or her—just kidding, it’s a him”) that weekend. (Yesterday, it was announced: Michael C. Hall, of “Dexter” and “Six Feet Under.”)

The band took the stage: Justin Craig (guitar, keyboards, vocals), the music director, who has a Pete Townshend nose and a prettified Nigel Tufnel hairstyle; Matt Duncan (bass, guitar, keyboards, vocals), who has short emerald-green hair and a macho black mustache; Tim Mislock (guitar, vocals), who has asymmetrical blond hair, like a half-buzzed Leif Garrett; Peter Yanowitz (drums, vocals), with crimson hair, on drums. They combine the look of old-school glam and punk with the one thing the genre currently lacks: youth.

Lena Hall, who won a Tony this year, for her performance as Hedwig’s put-upon sideman and husband, Yitzhak, took the mic and said, in a German accent, “Ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not: Hedwig!” The band played, and Rannells descended from the rafters. Trask’s “Hedwig” songs have everything: melody, swagger, piano, wit, electric guitar, harmony, fun, angst, a little filth. Watching Rannells strut and pout his way through “Tear Me Down,” I found myself thinking of Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler. Like Harris, Rannells has a presence that’s more gym than glam; he’s chiselled, with the legs of a superhero. (It’s hard to imagine that Miss Midnight Midwest Checkout Queen would be so buff.) But, during his monologues, Rannells was intimate, even quiet—an over-the-top character (“I do love a good scrim job”) done somewhat tastefully. He was likable, a pro, with a good voice that worked especially well during more sensitive songs, like “The Origin of Love.” The band sounded fantastic, providing an energy that fused all the elements together.

When I’d seen the show during Harris’s early previews, the crowd was drunk and bananas and over the moon—superfans high on the show’s being on Broadway, on Harris, on everything. I had dinner recently with two other people who had seen the show during those previews, and each said that the people next to them had warned them about how emotional they’d get during the show. Then they wept, screamed, and so on, right on cue. The people I’d sat next to during previews hadn’t warned me, but I wish they had.

Thursday’s audience was cheerful but not out of its mind—it lacked that raving quality. During “Sugar Daddy,” when Hedwig put on a grass-skirt-like fringe of flashing lights, strutted down the stairs, went into the audience, stood on the arms of a man’s chair, and swept her skirt above his face, saying, “It’s like a car wash!,” the young man beneath her smiled benignly, as if it were happening to someone else, or not at all, or as if he sat there every night and had grown accustomed to it.

Rannells’s performance grew on me—and the character deepens and improves in the course of the show. By the time he sang, “Here’s to Patti, and Tina, and Yoko, Aretha, and Nona, and Nico, and me,” I was won over. At curtain, there was an instant standing ovation, not the awkward bit-by-bit kind, and Rannells, unwigged and de-makeupped, looked like himself and acted like him, too, smiling humbly and waving at the crowd in a very un-Hedwig-like manner. It was surprising to see proof that it had been him under there. Afterward, outside the stage door, the usual crowd was assembled, in their crushed-velvet hats and whatnot, eager for autographs.

A couple of hours later, the Mercury Lounge was bustling. It was about sixty per cent young Hedheads (a couple with “Sleep No More”-style masks slung behind their heads, a heavyset woman in a black lace dress, a woeful man with bleached hair, stubble, and a plaid shirt) and forty per cent maturing rockers of a Mitchell-Trask vintage (a woman in skintight white-tiger-print pants, a man in an X “Los Angeles” T-shirt, a woman in a black-and-white checked dress with birds and flowers tattooed on her arms). I recognized Steven (Perfidia) Kirkham, the “Hedwig” wig supervisor, and other members of the Broadway crew. The band took the stage from the right of the room—at the Mercury Lounge, the dressing room is behind the audience. Their costumes were a bit more punk than glam; Yanowitz, at the drum kit, had a Mohawk that would have impressed anybody on Kings Road in 1979. Behind me, at the back of the room, unobtrusive, bespectacled, and half-smiling, was Stephen Trask.

“Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” Mislock yelled. Trask slipped to the front and stood on the padded bench along the right wall. The band sounded terrific. It felt respectably like being at a punk show at a club: people dancing to MC5, and then, with bouncy energy, to New Order’s “Ceremony.” The “forever”s sounded just as wonderfully ominous as you’d want them to. Duncan played a guitar with a rainbow strap, like Mork’s suspenders.

“Hey, New York! Thanks for coming to a midnight show on a Thursday like a bunch of dum-dums,” Mislock said. The dum-dums cheered. The band played Lou Reed’s “Vicious,” amiable and thumping. Call me sentimental, but it felt like an ideal night on the town.

Mislock said, “Hey! Where’s Shannon Conley at?” A blond woman in a red halter dress took the stage. “I’m a Tit—not full Tits yet!” she said. Conley, best known as the lead singer of Lez Zeppelin, is Lena Hall’s understudy in “Hedwig.” “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard,” Conley wailed. They tore into X-Ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” Conley was an excellent screamer. Trask, on his bench, laughed and nodded to the beat. I felt someone grab me and kiss my cheek—Mike Potter, saying hello. “You remember Nicole,” he said, of his young colleague Nicole Bridgeford, the show’s current makeup supervisor, and then he took her hand and they jumped into the heart of the dance floor as if jumping into a swimming pool. His blond hair bounced up and down as he danced, and he pointed both index fingers toward the ceiling. I imagined that he had danced this way in the nineties, too.

The band played “Love Is a Drug,” and Duncan both sang and played sax.

“Hey, where’s Lena Hall?” Mislock said. Hall, to wild cheers, took the stage in a white tank top. She wore purplish-black lipstick and had long black hair with straight bangs, unlike Yitzhak, who has a short greaser’s wig, with sideburns, and a beleaguered expression. Hall tends to look happy. I wondered how she could fit that hair under her wig, or if her hair was a wig, or what. “I thought I’d do a little Enya,” she said. The band played the amazing guitar-and-drums assault that begins Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation.” “I don’t give a damn about my reputation!” Hall sang. Her voice was powerful and raw, like Jett’s. Everybody danced, including two young guys in front of me, one of whom joyfully ruffled his friend’s hair as they jumped around.

“I would like to introduce Miriam Shor!” Hall said. Shor was the original Yitzhak. In the crowd, Potter jumped and pointed his fingers. “Ladies and gentlemen, Stephen Trask!” Trask took the stage, too.

They all sang “Dance This Mess Around,” by the B-52’s, Trask banging on a wooden hand-percussion instrument. The woman near me in the white-tiger-print pants danced with extra enthusiasm.

“Do the Aqua Velva!” Trask sang.

“Do the Dirty Dog!” Shor sang.

“Do the Escalator!” Trask sang.

Yanowitz took the mic. “Thanks so much for fuckin’ coming! This is for my friend in the band.” They played “Gigantic,” by the Pixies. I was glad to hear it unhooked from the context where I last heard it—in an iPhone commercial—and returned to a small club. I began to wish that all of my favorite music could be returned to a small club. (Note to self: listen to smaller bands.) The woman in the tiger pants said to the young man who’d had his hair ruffled: “You know what this song is about, right?” Then she whispered in his ear.

Trask came onstage again and said, “I finally figured out my ideal band to put together and it didn’t have me in it.” He sang “Natural’s Not in It.” He was awesome. He sounded just like Gang of Four. When he wasn’t singing, he turned sideways and danced. Sometimes he put his arms up in a Y shape. “Fornication makes you happy / No escape from society,” he sang. “Natural is not in it.”

One of the band members yelled, “We’re doing a pledge campaign for a fuckin’ record!” People cheered. Then they played “Kiss Off,” by the Violent Femmes. In my notebook, I wrote, “Next time just dance, no notebook.” They segued from “Kiss Off” into a long drumming intro of a great song that had the repeated lyric “Tits of clay tits of clay tits of clay!” I made another note: “Next time dance up front with other oldsters.” The younger people around me were into the music, but I suspected that they didn’t know it. (What some nice Hedhead born in 1992 knows about Gang of Four I have no idea.) The appropriate reaction to these songs—like the normal reaction to having Hedwig climb on top of someone’s chair—is a good maniacal freakout. The younger people in the room were game but not rabid. But that was about to change.

“Can I get Yitzhak past and present?”

Hall and Shor came onstage.

“It’s not a battle, it’s a lovefest,” Hall said. They sang “Random Number Generation,” from “Hedwig,” and all the phones came out, glowing white rectangles hovering above the crowd, filming or taking pictures. The audience sang along. Trask looked on from the bench. The song got the biggest applause of the night. Hall called Trask back onstage. He and the beloved Yitzhaks were the special guests. (No Hedwigs—Harris, in fact, got married in Italy this weekend.) And rightfully so: it was good to see Trask, Hall, and Shor front and center.

“This is a song about failed vaginaplasty,” Trask said. The band played “Angry Inch.” He sang about all the gory details; the Yitzhaks sang “tits of clay,” on backup vocals, the band was on fire, and the crowd was in heaven.