November 27, 2002

DOES A STADIUM tour by four superannuated Brits sponsored by E-Trade have anything to do with rock and roll? Where's the intimacy? The love? Try the Victoria Theatre. After the Stones rolled out of town with the pre-winter rainstorm, Hedwig and the Angry Inch popped up like a glitter-coated mushroom–and it really rocks!

Kevin Cahoon assumes the title role originated by John Cameron Mitchell in his 1998 Obie-winning glam-musical, later a celebrated film, now making its long-anticipated San Francisco debut with a sizable cult following ready and waiting. And while die-hard fans show up prepared to sing along, the show is so instantly contagious that no homework is necessary on the part of the uninitiated.

Hedwig is the story of an East Berlin girlie boy named Hansel, who enjoys American Armed Forces radio and resting his head in the oven. Hansel eventually gets engaged to an American G.I. and becomes Hedwig after a sex change designed to make their marriage legit and ensure escape to the West. But the operation is botched, leaving Hedwig with just an "angry inch" of her former self. Soon she's abandoned, left behind in a Kansas trailer park where she watches a televised fall of the Wall. She meets a boy who steals her heart and then the songs she's composed, using them to become rock star Tommy Gnosis. Hedwig, heart in tatters but spirit intact, plays out her story as a nightclub act (across town from Tommy's PacBell Park gig), flanked by her zombie-cool band the Angry Inch, which includes her second husband, the gender-ambiguous Yitzak (lisa e.).

For all its value as camp, Hedwig is a cabaret act of subtle sophistication. Based in part on Plato's Symposium (in dialectical relation to the philosophies of Ziggy Stardust, Lou Reed, et al), Mitchell's play explores the nature of love and identity from the uncertain borderline Hedwig occupies between man and woman. Like the wall physically and symbolically separating a world at war, Hedwig represents a bridge as well as a border, challenging us to "tear her down." Her story, like the best glam rock, has a quiet force that is the undercurrent of its self-conscious banality and cutting humor.

Under director Jason Eagan, Cahoon, who has played Hedwig in New York, Boston, and Edinburgh, Scotland, easily slips into his S.F. digs, joking with the audience about the great semi-seedy past of the Victoria and kidding the people in the cheap seats, "What's the matter? Couldn't get tickets to Puppetry of the Penis?" He's a charismatic presence in Farrah Fawcett hair, with a commanding voice and a flawless delivery. The insider references to San Francisco and the Mission District merely add to the conviction that the show must have sprung from local soil. It didn't, of course, but you can't always get what you want.

Crazy eights

Surprisingly, no audience member's cell phone rang during Alarms and Excursions, though if ever there was a play in which one might get away with it, this was it. The Aurora Theatre Company, having recently staged Michael Frayn's Benefactors with some success, takes up one of the British playwright's more purely comedic efforts, a play purportedly concerned with the inadvertently stultifying effects of modern technology. But despite the alarm-ringing opener, that seems a loose theme at best. The title links eight farcical vignettes that have just as much to do with modern alienation and the battle of the sexes.

Four actors (Adam Ludwig, Jennifer Wagner, John Oswald, and Lee Ann Manley) play a series of individuals flummoxed by the mundane details of modern life: unreasonable amounts of time and effort consumed by the time- and effort-saving gadgets no one can properly operate or identify; living compartments that somehow demand psychological as well as physical conformity; the shock of the new when a man flying coach unexpectedly pays attention to the stewardesses' safety procedure; a woman delivering a speech finding herself hostage to her teleprompter (commandeered by a vengeful speechwriter); four persons trying to get together who get no closer than a busy answering machine; and so on.

Much of this is moderately clever and entertaining. The best episode, "Doubles," features two couples in parallel hotel rooms, pinpointing the humane sensibility at work. Still, there are thin patches. When it comes to endings, Frayn has a lazy streak, and the humor often relies on straining a joke past its prime. Under director Søren Oliver, however, the scenes are well paced, crisply choreographed, and buoyed by some congenial ensemble work.

'Hedwig and the Angry Inch' runs open-ended, Wed.-Sun., 8 p.m. (also Sat., 11 p.m.), Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St., S.F.; $20-$40. 863-7576.