Hedwig might be “internationally ignored,” living in a trailer park in Junction City, Kan., proffering her song stylings to hostile audiences of two at a coffee shop while her sometime protege and lover Tommy Gnossis plays arenas.
But her performer at New Conservatory Theatre Center is Bay Area theater’s newest star in Samuel Del Rosario, who played the lead on the Saturday, May 16, opening night, alternating in the role with Trixxie Carr.
Revisiting the brilliant “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” is always welcome. John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s 1998 rock musical about an East Berliner who gets a chop-job sex-change operation for a green-card marriage has some of the most electric bangers in the musical theater canon.
Its cabaret setup, with us as the audience to another of Hedwig’s bad gigs (maybe one notch above the coffee shop pair), affords cheeky, double entendre-laced fourth-wall breaking. The story serves a heady brew of winking perfomativity and shimmering vulnerability — equal parts irony and humanism, devastation and redemption…