Hedwig and Company rock TSKW
Mutilation, anger, rock and roll, totally twisted gender bending – what’s not to love?
A troop of very talented, very high-energy young (or young and youngish?) musicians/character actors/singers from Baltimore rolled into town this week with a rollicking production of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” at The Studios of Key West that actually had some younger audience members in a frenzy and some fairly staid, older Key Westers screaming and pumping air.
What fun! The show opened Thursday night and played to a nearly-full house Friday night; it closes tonight and if you like that sort of thing — and good and loud rock and roll (although the bowl of earplugs at the door smacked of overkill; we returned ours two-thirds of the way through) — it’s highly recommended.
This is definitely not your ordinary “sweet transsexual from Transylvania” and makes most of Rocky Horror seem pretty tame, but it really is entertaining. We even laughed at some of the very bad German v. Jew lines as Adam Cooley’s Hedwig, the equal-opportunity offender who, of course, has to carry the show and does so wonderfully. She banters at dialogue-mute co-star Itzak, “the last Jew in the Balkans,” who kept us gender-guessing. It turns out Lex Holzer is a fairly small woman, albeit with a huge voice, a substantial vocal range and an immense gift for pantomime and acting surly, masculine and menacing through most of the show — but we had to ask drummer Spencer Sinnott after the show to be sure.
The rest of the high-energy, high-quality ensemble are Jeff Paledino on bass guitar, David Gregory on electric guitar and Stacy W.I.D. (yeah, that’s his name) on keyboards. All are, like Sinnott, fine musicians.
We lost a couple of older farts along the way of the X-rated 90-minute — um — rock musical monologue, comedy, multi-character play, part-pantomime, concert, heaven knows what all. But we can guarantee you’ve never seen anything quite like it before, outside the cult movie it’s based on. And there’s always something about up-close, sweating live performance that trumps film. Thanks to the Tropic Cinema for their sponsorship.
The new staff – and original, longer term staff — at TSKW are turning it into a mini, Old Town Tennessee Williams Theatre, with a broad spectrum of shows covering the wide variety of performance arts.
Curtain is 8 p.m. tonight. Better phone the TSKW program office at 305- 296-0458 to see if tickets are available.
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