One of the most affecting pieces of art that I have seen would have to be Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I posted on it a while back:

It's funny when a piece of art falls right in to your life at a time when you seem to need to hear it's message. It's happened a couple times in mine. One of the biggest examples in my life was the Key: The Metal Idol anime series. More recently, it has been Hedwig and the Angry Inch. So I've moved on from Key, a little robot girl trying to become human, to Hedwig, a transsexual rock star trying to find herself.

Is my life screwed up or what?

More seriously, Hedwig is by far the more surprising of the two because transsexuality is something that I've never been comfortable with and, for the most part, still am not. Yet by the time I was done with this movie, I felt that I had everything in common with her, minus the musical talent and sex change operation.

I saw the movie ten or so times in the first week that I got it. The DVD came with the movie, a feature where you could skip between songs, and an 85-minute "making of Hedwig" feature that itself I watched a couple of times. I also purchased both soundtracks and recieved the tribute album for Christmas. Some people don't care as much for it, but I can't get enough of it. The only tragedy, I thought, is that I would probably never get to see it on stage. Well, less than a month after I move out of Houston, it's playing at Fitzgerald's. Ulysses Zwiebel has a review:

The band needs work all the way around. Having been privy at rehearsals to the talent on board, I knew that getting them up to speed was going to be a Herculean task. It didn’t get there. I figured it would be a struggle even just to learn a few of the songs, but at least attempts were made on the whole set. The drummer, Tiny Flowers, did in fact improve noticeably from the first practice, but he is still not up to the job. No musical will succeed when the timing on nearly every song is so shaky it’s like Michael J. Fox after a double espresso. Intros and exits from songs are very unstable and these points should be established more clearly even if it means creating minute gaps in the dialog.

Louis Weyrich gamely attempts to reproduce the score literally and should have taken more latitude in giving the songs his own voice. He has not perfected his playing to the point that one can relax with the song in his hands. He is hampered already by a serious lack of rhythm on the keyboards and having an unsettled drummer doesn’t help. Granted, it’s the first performance, but one should be able to play the intro to "Wicked Little Town" without that much trouble. I sat down at mom’s about two weeks ago and played it to better effect having never even tried it before on the piano. (That may sound self-flattering, but I leave open an offer to play it for anyone who asks and will be satisfied to let him or her judge for themselves.) Sadly, this means that the loveliest song in the entire score is DOA. The same goes for "Wig in a Box," the defining song of this show. This beautiful melody was strangled, suffocated and left for dead right there on stage. Very sad indeed.

Okay, so it's not exactly John Cameron Mitchell and needs some work, but I really don't care! If I had the time and money, I'd fly down to Houston just to see it on stage.

Un. Fair.