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Local Actor Stars In Hedwig And The Angry Inch At The Broward Center

When it first hit the off-broadway stage twenty years ago, Hedwig and the Angry Inch stunned audiences with its progressive stances on homosexuality, transgender identity and crass humor. Since its opening performance, it has been turned into an award-winning film, a Broadway show starring Neil Patrick Harris and a cult classic for lovers of the theater. 

The show follows the story of Hedwig, a gay immigrant from East Germany who falls in love with an American naval officer. The young and impressionable Hedwig reluctantly gets a sex change to please the male officer but finds himself divorced and living in a trailer within a year of their marriage. Hedwig shares his story directly with the audience in a mix of a one-man show, rock musical, stand-up comedy and bits of tragedy. 

Dominique Scott, a New World School of the Arts graduate, plays the lead role.  The role requires an intense amount of physicality and at times proved challenging for Scott, as he explains in the conversation with Sundial's Luis Hernandez. You can hear/read part of their conversation below. 

I've heard interviews with actors who have taken on this role and in one of them I heard that, basically, this is not a role that you can phone in. You have got to make the full transformation in order to really get into it [the character]. What was the process like for you, in making that transformation?

Scott: So Hedwig doesn't leave the stage at all.

And is on the stage for the full 90 minutes, so you're all talking and singing for a straight 90 minutes. And it took a lot of preparation, it took about three months of memorizing because that's always the hardest part as an actor, you kind of have to get through the text first before you can really start letting go and making it your own.

But yeah, it took three months of memorizing, of really figuring out every part of the story. It's a beautiful story.  It's about this person's journey. He started out he was born in Germany. It follows this young gay boy named Tunsil and he grew up in war torn Germany, you know, in East Berlin when the Berlin Wall was up. It was a very socially and economically depressed society was and so he wanted to get out at all costs. He had almost nothing.

Describe a little bit about who Hedwig is.

Scott: It's interesting to note a lot of people mistakenly think of Hedwig as transgender but that's not really an accurate description of Hedwig. Most transgender people feel, actually all feel they are born with one gender and then they decide, you know what, this isn't who I am.

In Hedwig, he didn't really make the choice because he wanted to be a woman. He made it out of necessity or so he thought a necessity to get out of Berlin. And moreso the operation ended up being botched, which kind of is the centerpiece of the theme of gender identity in Hedwig. There's a sense of like, "Well who am I. I'm not quite a man I'm not quite a woman." And I think overall the text of Hedwig really wants us to see people as people and the less we can define people by a box of sexuality. And instead of trying to label each other as different things, race or it extends to anything, but getting away from labels and trying to see people as human beings who all have different life journeys and experience. That's kind of the core message for me and Hedwig.

Something you said that was interesting, you're on stage pretty much the entire show. So that in and of itself, for anybody who's ever done theater, knows that that is a marathon. But the night that my producer went to the show one of your high heels broke and you had to keep performing with one broken shoe.

Scott: Yeah, my heel broke during the opening number in fact. So I spent for the next 70 minutes performing, somehow to be honest I don't know how I did it. But I guess I kept my weight on the balls of my feet for the entire show. And I was able to kind of get through it and then it broke. Hedwig has like a meltdown at the end and takes off his heels. So then it really broke, like it shattered right at that moment. So it kind of worked out for that show. But yeah, I was I was lucky I'm not quite sure how I did that actually.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is running at the Broward Center through November 25th.

Chris knew he wanted to work in public radio beginning in middle school, as WHYY played in his car rides to and from school in New Jersey. He’s freelanced for All Things Considered and was a desk associate for CBS Radio News in New York City. Most recently, he was producing for Capital Public Radio’s Insight booking guests, conducting research and leading special projects at Sacramento’s NPR affiliate.