Performances don’t get any more sizzlingly sensational than Tom Avery’s powerhouse star turn as Hedwig in Chance Theater’s 2024 supercharged season opener, Hedwig And The Angry Inch.

Following in the footsteps of Broadway icon Neil Patrick Harris and the show’s writer/role-originating star John Cameron Mitchell, Avery plays Hansel, an East German “slip of a girly boy” whose mother generously allowed him play in the oven while listening to “the voices of the American masters: Toni Tenille, Debby Boone, and Anne Murray, who was actually a Canadian but working in the American idiom,” iconic performers who “left as deep an impression on me as that oven rack did on my face.”

Then came the day that a now young-adult Hansel met army sergeant Luther Robinson who, immediately smitten, proposed marriage on the condition that Hansel undergo gender reassignment surgery, a botched operation that left a newly renamed Hedwig with an “angry inch where my penis used to be, where my vagina never was.”

Still, at the very least, marriage to Luther meant a new life in Junction City, Kansas, that is until Hedwig’s hubby left her for someone with an actual penis, prompting Hedwig to create a new, luscious, leggy, platinum blonde persona for herself as vocalist for a band called The Angry Inch, co-writing songs with Christian teen Tommy Speck, soon to become rock star Tommy Gnosis and leave the “internationally ignored” Hedwig behind.

All of this and more is recounted by Hedwig in what is essentially a 90-minute rock concert featuring songs (music and lyrics by Stephen Trask) that recount her bumpy road to obscurity, backed up vocally by Yitzhak (Laura Herskov), aka Hedwig’s “man Friday through Thursday” and instrumentally by a four-piece rock band: Lex Leigh as Skszp, James Michael McHale as Jacek, Mazie Voss and Krzyshtof, and Julia Smushkova as Schlatko.

Trask’s and Mitchell’s songs run the gamut of musical styles, from the Elton John-like “Tear Me Down” to the folk-rock ballad “Origin of Love” to the country flavored “Sugar Daddy” to the hard rock “Angry Inch” to the bubblegum-catchy “Wig in a Box” with its sing-along chorus.

There’s also the ‘60s style ballad “Wicked Little Town,” which Avery performs twice, once as Hedwig and again later as Tommy, the torchy “Hedwig’s Lament,” the head-banging metallic “Exquisite Corpse,” and the rock-waltzy “Midnight Radio,” all of them performed by an absolutely dazzling Tom Avery, that is when the Seattle native isn’t inspiring one laugh after another in a series of racy double entendres, as when Hedwig follows her opening number applause with “I do love a warm hand on my entrance,” or when she recalls all of “the people I’ve come upon” and all of “the people who have come upon me.”

Not only that, but Avery aces transitions from the sassy, saucy, German-accented Hedwig to Luther’s Kansas country-and-western drawl to none other than a stripped-down-to-skivvies Tommy Gnosis himself.

In other words, there may be five other performers on stage (and Herskov does get to show off her own power pipes in “The Long Grift”), but if ever there was a solo performance deserving of an orgasmic ovation, it is Avery’s as Hedwig.

Following last summer’s critically acclaimed Rent, Matthew McCray once again proves himself Chance Theater’s go-to director where rock musicals are concerned, reunited here with costume designer Bradley Allen Lock and projection designer Nick Santiago, whose creative contributions are the very definition of imaginative and inspired.

The same can be said about scenic designer Bradley Kaye, who has transformed the Cripe Stage into a deliciously seedy La Palma Club; Zach Moore, whose lighting design never fails to dazzle; sound designer/engineer James Markoski, who fills the house with rock-decibel power and punch; and hair-and-makeup designer Kate Galleran, who has the entire cast coiffed and made up to weird, wild, and wonderful effect.

Nicole Schlitt is stage manager and booth operator. Bruce Goodrich is dramaturg. Glenda Morgan Brown is dialect coach. Charlie Viehl is assistant music director. Kyled Baumbusch is scenic painter.

Rent. American Idiot. Lizzie. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Triassic Parq – The Musical. Hair. The Who’s Tommy.

There’s probably no theater in or around Orange County with a better track record where rock musicals are concerned than the Chance, proof positive of which can be savored with the latest Chance Theater rock masterpiece: Hedwig And The Angry Inch.

Chance Theater, 5522 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim Hills.
www.ChanceTheater.com

–Steven Stanley
February 3, 2024
Photos: Casey Long

Tags: Chance Theater, John Cameron Mitchell, Orange County Theater Review, Stephen Trask