10 things you didn't know about "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"

At turns funny and poignant, the award-winning show ruminates on gender identity, love, and sacrifice. For the uninitiated, here are a few facts about the gender-bending musical, which opens this weekend at the Peabody Opera House.

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The groundbreaking Hedwig and the Angry Inch is coming to the Peabody Opera House from January 27 to 29. The show is about the lead singer of a punk rock band who, thanks to a botched sex change operation, is now a “gender of one” with an inch-long lump of skin between her legs. At turns funny and poignant, the award-winning show ruminates on gender identity, love, and sacrifice. For the uninitiated, here are a few facts about the gender-bending musical.

  1. The writer, director and first star of Hedwig, John Cameron Mitchell, met composer Stephen Trask on a plane. They were the only two people not watching the in-flight film. Trask used the Rainer Werner Fassbinder biography he was reading as a conversation starter.
  2. The show opened in 1998 Off-Broadway at the Jane Street Theatre (later the Jane Hotel), which had been around for 100 years. Over that time, the building had been a ballroom, a sailor’s hotel, a punk rock club and a sex club. It had also housed the surviving crew of the Titanic.
  3. The show’s final song, “Midnight Radio,” was written days before the Hedwig first opened Off-Broadway. Originally, the play ended with a German version of Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” but the creators couldn’t get rights to the song.
  4. In the early days of the Jane Street Theatre production, someone OD’d in the hotel and died. The dead body was wheeled out past waiting theater patrons, despite the house manager’s protestations.
  5. Mitchell worked on creating the character of Hedwig at SqueezeBox!, a drag club. When he first got on stage as Hedwig, it was Mitchell’s first time doing drag.
  6. A regular at SqueezeBox!, Mike Potter, became friends with Mitchell. Potter explained that he had been doing hair and makeup since he was young, but never professionally. Mitchell asked Potter to do his hair and makeup for a Squeezebox! performance with Deborah Harry of Blondie. Potter later did hair and makeup for the Broadway version of Hedwig starring Neil Patrick Harris.
  7. John Cameron Mitchell played Hedwig and directed the film, which came out in 2001. Though it wasn’t commercially successful, it became a cult classic like the Off-Broadway show.
  8. Though there was talk about doing Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Broadway as early as 2009, the show didn’t open until 2014. Director Michael Mayer wanted Neil Patrick Harris to play Hedwig. Harris was busy doing the TV show How I Met Your Mother.
  9. Atlantic Records spent half a million dollars trying to make Hedwig and the Angry Inch a hit album in the early aughties, but the album didn’t catch on.
  10. Mitchell is writing a sequel to Hedwig about the character’s experiences in middle age. “My goal is to do a trilogy and when I’m 70 to do the final chapter,” he said to Rolling Stone in 2014.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is at the Peabody Opera House (1400 Market Street) from January 27–29. Shows are at 8 p.m. Friday, 2 & 8 p.m. Saturday, and 1:30 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $30–$82. For more information visit peabodyoperahouse.com.

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