She thickens her eyebrows with heavy makeup until they are four times their original size. Her eyes harden. She segments her long hair and pins it in tight curls against her head. The crowning touch comes as wig supervisor Steven Perfidia lowers the hairpiece onto her head.
If you walked in and saw her for the first time under low lights, you would be fooled. Hall has become a man. This is a question she has given a great deal of thought to, out of curiosity and necessity. Hall was the first to play Yitzhak when the show made its Broadway debut in I feel that a woman playing Hedwig sends a very necessary message to the world.
Hall still plays Yitzhak in the touring version of the show, which is at the Pantages through Nov. For Hall to wear these multiple wigs, so to speak, requires more gender-bending than the notoriously gender-bending show has previously put forth.
After all, this is a woman who usually plays a man who likes to dress as a woman. She won a Tony for her efforts on Broadway. Although women have played Hedwig in the past, the role is most often played by men and most closely associated with its creator, John Cameron Mitchell, who followed a off-Broadway premiere with a cult film adaptation. In her heart, Hall says, she thinks Hedwig is a woman. Because of this, Hall says she simply needs to revert to her true self in order to play Hedwig.
So for a woman to play Hedwig is just complete and utter relaxation. The role of Yitzhak is the second biggest in the show, but it unfolds mostly in the background. Yitzhak only wants to please Hedwig. Once the story had been formed and the songs and lyrics written, the path to success for Hedwig and the Angry Inch was not an easy one and, much like the character, Mitchell and Trask struggled to find an audience, performing it in tiny venues or in the early hours of the morning. Even when, with the help of director Peter Askin, Hedwig made it to off-Broadway, the audience didn't immediately find them.
Even though we were never a big hit, we became the hip thing. Then there was a bidding war for the movie, which was shocking to us.
New Line [who ended up producing it] was one of the few companies run by one person, Bob Shaye; he was getting ready to do Lord of the Rings and allowed me to make the film the way I wanted. One of the most impressive things about the film they would go on to create is how, as Bogutskaya puts it, "the film uses cinematic language quite uniquely and uses the medium that it's in to its full extent.
It's not just trying to film the show or replicate it. It premiered at Sundance in to a rapturous reception, winning a prize for Best Director and the much-coveted Audience Award. The film received critical acclaim when it first appeared at festivals in Credit: Getty Images. But, amazingly, it was while the Hedwig team were still at Sundance that things started to go wrong for the film. All of our producers were fired. I still need to tell you that, despite that, if I had been in charge then like I am now, this movie would not have been made and you're fired' — she was literally fired while walking down the street with us.
The new people in charge actively hated the movie so we had to depend entirely on free publicity, which meant getting into every film festival possible.
We did dozens, if not a hundred, film festivals and we were huge hits at all of them — but by the time it came out, we had been at so many film festivals that tens of thousands of people had already seen it. And then when we were getting ready to do our expansion, very sadly, September 11th happened and everyone stopped going to the [cinema].
And it was not until the DVD release that its audience began to grow. Hedwig DVDs were passed around friend groups, watched on date nights and played at parties.
Much like in its original theatrical incarnation, word of mouth and its intriguing hipness brought Hedwig to a whole new group of people who would then attend singalong screenings in Hedwig's signature giant blonde wigs.
Hedwig was, for many people, quite unlike anything they had seen before. The arguably more insidious alternative are films like Boys Don't Cry, All about My Mother, Bad Education or The Dallas Buyers Club which Trask describes as "'give me an Oscar' movies where some very pretty straight actor… [is dressed up] to act out the pain and the trauma [of a transgender or gender non-conforming character].
The film was inarguably ahead of its time and able to make distinctions between gender, sexuality and drag in ways that mainstream culture is only now catching up with.
For Diversity and LGBT inclusion specialist Yassine Senghor, the power of Hedwig is how it taps into the difficulty of defining yourself when no one label fits. Of course, as times change and the world progresses, drag and gender non-conformity has become much more accepted; but certain elements of Hedwig have become more controversial.
Lillian Crawford, a culture writer whose podcast and newsletter Listen to Lillian explore representations of gender in British film, watched the film recently and while she found plenty to admire "the songs are so good! Trans representation before and since [the film] has focused on kind of a traumatic event that makes you trans.
But for its creators, Hedwig isn't a trans story. We were telling the story of a person and we were interested in dualities in general and the gender duality was one of them, but it was just part of what made Hedwig.
I've never been a much of a label person, but I know it's very important when you're young. For the new touring production, which launched on Sunday, October 2nd in San Francisco and stars Darren Criss in the lead, Hall reprises her Yitzhak character. Speaking by phone from San Francisco, Hall explains that she was reluctant to revisit Yitzhak after her incredible send off that included all her costars , as well as newcomer Criss Taye Diggs was the final actor to play Hedwig during that Broadway run.
She worked with composer Stephen Trask on coming up with a unique sound for rocker Tommy. But people are especially curious about how she will handle the tomato-smashing punk finale that calls for near nudity.
Watch here. Rudy Archuleta. Newswire Powered by.
0コメント