Panic!: Hedwig and the Angry Inch

**Events may have been canceled or postponed. Please contact the venue to confirm the event.

Date & Time

Tue, Mar 04 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM

Address (map)

University of California, Santa Barbara

Venue (website)

Pollock Theater

With this trailblazing musical, writer/director/star John Cameron Mitchell and composer/lyricist Steven Trask brought their remarkable stage show to the screen for a movie as unclassifiable as its protagonist. Raised as a boy in divided East Berlin, Hedwig undergoes a dramatic transformation in order to emigrate to the U.S. as the wife of an American serviceman. Now in Junction City, Kansas, Hedwig suffers heartache after heartache, leaving her American husband the very same year the Berlin Wall comes down. She reinvents herself as an “internationally ignored” but divinely talented rock diva who tours her musical act across a chain of Midwestern seafood restaurants and serves as a muse for men who go on to achieve fame with songs they’ve stolen from her. Mitchell and Trask use Hedwig’s music, an eclectic mix of punk anthems and power ballads, to spill Hedwig’s romantic and tragic life story, punctuated with a cinematic mosaic of music video fantasies and moments of bracing emotional realism.

Over twenty years since its release, Hedwig and the Angry Inch remains as relevant as ever to the politics of the day. A child of division, Hedwig refuses to be caught between categories, instead evading gender description and embracing herself as lovingly as one can. Writer/director/actor John Cameron Mitchell will join moderator Patrice Petro (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center) for a post-screening discussion of Hedwig of the Angry Inch.

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