Friday, July 27, 2012

The Idea of a Hedwig Sequel Gives Me a Reason to Continue Living

Posted By on Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 3:15 PM

The very strange musical Hedwig & the Angry Inch is one of my favorite things ever, so even the announcement of a first draft of a sequel is just about the most exciting news I've heard in awhile. Sure, it'll probably be another decade or so before I actually see it live (and based on the limited box office success of the film version, I doubt it'll be on the big screen), but any Hedwig news is good news:


BREAKING CULTURAL NEWS: I’m not sure if this has been announced anywhere or not. I had coffee-and-conversation this morning here in Greenwich Village with my old friend John Cameron Mitchell, the creator of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. He is busy putting the finishing touches on his first draft of a Hedwig sequel and will be doing a reading and recreating the role of Hedwig on September 16th at a special performance at this year’s Afterglow Festival in Provincetown. “We spend so much of our early lives trying to figure out who we really are,” he said as a way to enigmatically sum up the new Hedwig plot line. “And we spend the rest of our lives preparing ourselves to let it go.”

He then went on to tell me in detail the narrative of the sequel for which Hedwig’s original composer Stephen Trask will write the music once more. There was such sweet excitement in his voice as he told me scene after scene, much like the sweetness and excitement he first had when so many years ago we sat in another coffee shop and he shyly admitted he was writing the role of a transgendered rock’n’roller so he could play it himself...

As for the sequel? Let’s just say it’s something that could only happen to Hedwig - a phantasmagoria with dollops of brutal reality interwoven into its multi-media narrative.

Hedwig lives!

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