Tribute to Hedwig

In an earlier post, I stated Man of La Mancha as my favorite musical. That will not change. I also claimed West Side Story as the best musical ever written, and I stand by that. Finally, I paid tribute to Grease as the fundamental musical story of my Motherland, the Northwest side of Chicago. Yet still I must pay tribute to a musical that forever changed and influenced me when I first saw it in Chicago in the spring of 2001.

To appreciate Hedwig you must begin with romance, which Hawthorne identified with moonlight as the "medium most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests" ("The Custom-House"). Edmund Spenser was Hawthorne's original, as he was Milton's. Harold Bloom says of Spenser that he "project[ed] both the object of desire and the shape of nightmare with equal imaginative freedom" (Introduction to Edmund Spenser: Modern Critical Views, 1986). So I take the definition of romance, in art and life, to be the object of desire and the obstacle which prevents one from attaining it.

Hedwig follows the object of her desire, Tommy Gnosis, around the world singing the songs that she taught him, which have made him famous. She goes from an idealistic, Platonic love ("The Origin of Love") to the shattering of that illusion yielding to the promise of a pragmatic guide: "And if you've got no other choice / You know you can follow my voice" ("Wicked Little Town"). She needs a spiritual guide, as all of us do, and she can only find it in the genius who has both inspired her, and whom she has taught to sing. Perhaps the reference to the Greek term gnosis, our knowledge, is too explicit. Nevertheless, we cannot but help following Hedwig in her quest for knowledge, her own Tommy.

Her quest passes through the performance of the wig in the box. Hedwig herself is the romantic fantasist as a rock 'n' roll and beauty queen all at once. We pass through crisis after crisis with Hedwig, the "angry inch" a symbol of our interval of life. The play may be more lyrical than properly dramatic, more a concert than an action. Key to Hedwig's pathos is her division from knowledge, and her self-conscious representation of division itself. Plato's myth construes us as originally unified. Perhaps ideally we are unified. We'd like to think so. Desire would be impossible without the dream of merger, but it only exists in separation. So we have the myth of the fall.

Hedwig is the fall, the separation, and also the bridge of romance. Every time she applies her lipstick she remounts the drama of unity and separation, desire and fulfillment. The play destroys our concepts and restores us to the primacy of voice, whether ours or the other's, the rock 'n' roll or theatrical audience, or Tommy himself, the eternally vanishing object of our desire.