Samuel Del Rosario as Hedwig in New Conservatory Theatre Center’s “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”
Rachel Z Photography/New Conservatory Theatre Center
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.
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Samuel Del Rosario as Hedwig, left, and Trixxie Carr as Yitzhak in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” The two actors alternate who plays which role in New Conservatory Theatre Center’s production.
Rachel Z Photography/New Conservatory Theatre Center
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.
“Hedwig and the Angry Inch”: Book by John Cameron Mitchell. Music and lyrics by Stephen Trask. Directed by Chris Morrell. Through June 7. One hour, 50 minutes. $33.50-$72.50. New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness Ave., Lower Lobby, S.F. 415-861-8972. www.nctcsf.org
Here, sex, quite seriously, is the highest religious good, returning us to our natural state, which is to be joined to another being. At the same time that the show unspools that alternate human origin story, it makes finding that other half heartbreaking and humiliating — if not altogether hopeless — even for someone who, like Hedwig, has a “mound of flesh” left where privates should be after her botched operation.
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With Del Rosario in the title role at opening, Carr played Yitzhak, Hedwig’s trampled-upon sidekick, all shuffly gait and aw-shucks half-smiles till Hedwig’s abuse goes too far and Yitzhak shouts a curse word while trudging offstage. Then Yitzhak is liable to fling open the (fake) backstage door, where the stadium light and sound from the much larger concert of Hedwig’s nemesis Tommy Gnossis floods in.
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Trixxie Carr as Yitzhak in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”
Rachel Z Photography/New Conservatory Theatre Center
Carr’s full-throttle belt on Yitzhak’s one solo, “The Long Grift,” suggests audiences should simply see the show twice to experience two wondrous leads. But Del Rosario, under the direction of Chris Morrell, is giving a breakout performance in his own right.
As a singer, he knows just when to let a stage whisper ooze into a chest voice, then when to back off again, like it’s all too much. His mic stand is his humping partner, then his firearm’s lever. Early on, he marches over to Diogo Zavadski on the guitar to make his tongue dance on the strings, as if those wild notes are emanating from a sexual act.
He knows when to play into the clown mask of Chris Steele’s makeup — eyeshadow and mascara as thick as curtains, lipstick smudged upward like the Joker’s smile — and when to drop it. At those moments the eyes shine through like a cat’s glowing in the dark. Each line is maybe a joke, maybe a reveal, always a dare. Are you in enough to get it? Have you suffered enough to understand? Before you can decide, Del Rosario has twirled onward.
Costume designs, also by Steele, are rich-text works of art. Lavender fishnets peep through holes in bell-bottom pants with three tiers of fringe. A punk rock pleated skirt is held to a belt with giant metal pins the size of eating utensils. Yitzhak wears a bandolier made of Hot Wheels.
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Samuel Del Rosario as Hedwig in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”
Rachel Z Photography/New Conservatory Theatre Center
The four-piece band, under the musical direction of Jake Gale, doesn’t just shred. The musicians make the unlikely love song “Wicked Little Town” so twinkly you practically see stars. It’s a moment of suspended time, like one of those dreamland soundstage numbers in Golden Age musicals, but it’s all achieved with tender yet playful musicianship and Del Rosario’s beneficent gaze.
For many of us, musical theater’s ability to whisk you away like that elevates it to religion. But if there’s a holdout in your life, try this production’s version of “The Origin of Love” on them. That’s the number where Hedwig narrates a sex-ecstatic human mythology. As shadow puppets by Morrell and Dave Haaz-Baroque rewrite our fall from grace, Christian V. Mejia’s lighting design slashes in like lightning rained down by angry gods.
They’re angry because they’re jealous. “Hedwig” invites us to liberate ourselves of that anger and jealousy, the way we fear and police sex, and see it not just as hedonism. Dare, this life-giving show says, to let down your own Berlin Wall to another.