Hedwig and the Angry Inch Finally Comes to Hong Kong

“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare’s Juliet scoffed.

“Destiny,” Ivanhoe Lam might reply.

When Lam was three years old, his mother sat him on his bed at home in Stanley and bestowed on him his English name, after Sir Walter Scott’s chivalrous knight. 

“My mom wanted me to help people,” he explains, a wish that sent him to the Salesian missionaries at Tang King Po College in Wan Chai.  

We are in Lam’s light filled, IKEA-chic studio, a flight up from the Mong Kok Flower Market on Easter Sunday. Relaxing after back-to-back photo shoots, the 39-year-old choreographer is looking sleek in a black mesh polo and flowy pants. He has alighted like a raven on the edge of a chair to finally talk. When his calling turned out to be dance, he says, his mother’s belief in him “gave me a lot of energy to be brave as an artist.”

Hedwig also turned up at Lau Bak Livehouse recently, looking like a 1990s chanteuse in a blonde blunt bob, a yellow cut-out jacket by Taiwan-born designer Lin Yen Te of couture brand Nildet and purple sequined leggings. Photo by Kent Foran, courtesy LauBak Bar Tou

Now that conviction is spurring him towards his holy grail: directing a made-for-Hong Kong version of John Cameron Mitchell’s rock and roll musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It is a challenge that has called to him like Excalibur in the stone, ever since he saw the film version when he was 17. On the cusp of turning 40, he is confident he has the reputation and skills to finally take it on. “This is a show on my bucket list,” he intones so solemnly it sounds like a book of scripture. “I didn’t want to ruin it. I didn’t want to be like, ‘I’ll just try it.’” 

For the uninitiated, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a genderqueer coming-of-age story with a glam rock soul. It follows Hedwig, an equal parts talented and tortured singer/songwriter and drag queen suffering from a botched sex change — leaving an “angry inch” of unresolved male genitalia — as she stalks her former lover who is shooting to fame by stealing her music. 

Hedwig premiered Off-Broadway in 1998, but the 2001 movie sealed its cult following. Mitchell, who directs and stars, wears over 20 outrageous looks; Hedwig’s most iconic wig, a platinum, colossally curled affair, was inspired by the coifs of Farah Fawcett and George Washington. A Broadway version followed in 2014, and the show has enjoyed hugely popular iterations around the world, including in Seoul (currently on its 14th run), Tokyo and Taipei, where Hedwig’s theme of dual identities was amplified by allusions to the Taiwan-China relationship. 

Behind Hedwig’s bodacious concert antics and flamboyant makeup, the plot beats out the hard-fought journey of an outcast toward self-acceptance. In the closing scene, after abandoning her drag, Hedwig appears as a knight — bare chested, forehead barred with a silver cross — before continuing alone on her quest for love. 

It’s not hard to see how Lam found “something really common to me” in the movie, at a time when he was “struggling” to choose between the “very traditional” theatre and dance streams offered by the Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts. He credits the Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui for opening his eyes to a generous interdisciplinarity of performance mediums. The work Lam saw was Foi (Faith): an apt encounter for the seeker he was and still is. He enrolled at Codarts Rotterdam, where he found a dance community focused on innovation and new movement philosophies. When he graduated in 2010, he was “ready to be a maker.” 

Dragon slayer might be a better term. Lam choreographed his first Hong Kong Repertory show at 28, directed Cantopop star Prudence Liew’s Karma Chameleon concert at the Hong Kong Coliseum at 30, and was the movement director to film star Sylvia Chang at 32. His rise to the top was preternatural in Hong Kong, where invisible hierarchies keep emerging artists waiting years for opportunities. 

His recent original creations (three major commissions in 2024 alone) have been sought out by City Contemporary Dance Company, the Hong Kong Jockey Club, Hong Kong Arts Festival and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, which commissioned him to inaugurate its newest space in Wong Chuk Hang. And the city’s most successful musical theatre show in recent years, Hong Kong Repertory’s The Impossible Trial? Lam, too.  

Success breeds jealousy, especially in circles as small as Hong Kong’s dance world. Lam claims not to listen to the naysayers, although when the topic comes up, he looks as if he might cry, perhaps because he wants to share another anecdote about his mother. 

“My mom told me, ‘Whatever you do, you have to be the best; you cannot be just mediocre,” he finally answers, a vow he has wholly internalized. And he justifies his many collaborations: “As an artist you have to be exploring, not just follow one teacher. I go free-rider to enlarge my spectrum of seeing things. These last six years have been a great journey to be the best and make me feel like I’m ready to take on Hedwig.”

WestK Creators is producing the show; nevermind that the series is meant to develop original work. It’s just Lam shattering another norm, though it helps that he has cast Hong Kong’s musical theatre superstar Jordan Cheng as Hedwig. No one other than Cheng has the killer combination of dulcet looks, bright tenor and doe-y eyes to pull it off. 

 “I believe a lot in attraction,” Lam says as if he bends energy as casually as he eats breakfast. In fact, Lam “put a spell” on Cheng by playing the Hedwig soundtrack during cast warmups when they were working together on The Impossible Trial (Cheng plays the ghost Ah Sai). The charm worked: Cheng approached Lam about creating a Hong Kong version and offered to translate the script and lyrics into Cantonese himself. “It’s a collaboration that has come together effortlessly,” Lam shrugs.

Mitchell’s heroine is a down-and-out East Berlin escapee to Kansas who gigs at a seafood restaurant chain called Bilgewater with a backup band of misfit rockers. Apparently, that could hardly do for Hong Kong. Cheng says he sees Hedwig as a metaphor for the city: chaotic and messy on the outside, but with a pure purpose at heart, and “uniquely hybrid” in the way only Hong Kong can be.  Lam wanted an “elevated” Hedwig, and he and Cheng have been trying out how different looks — Chicago-style vamp, Hollywood starlet — work in iconic locations like the Star Ferry, the Mid-Levels Escalator, and inevitably, Lan Kwai Fong. Hedwig also turned up at Lau Bak Livehouse recently, looking like a 1990s chanteuse in a blonde blunt bob, a canary yellow cut-out jacket and purple sequined leggings. Lam calls this “expanding the emotional memory between Hedwig and the Hong Kong audience.”  

The original soundtrack by Stephen Trask has been reimagined to reflect “the way we do clubbing now,” Lam reveals. One of Trask’s best loved songs, the honky tonk Sugar Daddy, is getting an EDM makeover. Others, like Wicked Little Town and the show’s central song-story, Origin of Love, take cues from arena rock. The music director is Veronica Lee who has a thirty year career in Hong Kong’s pop music industry, composing and producing for artists like Anthony Wong, Denise Ho, Eason Chan and Joey Yung. 

In the 10 years since Hedwig premiered on Broadway, Hong Kong has proved impervious to her campy thrills, making the city an outlier even in Asia, where Seoul has the honour of calling itself Hedwig’s home in the East. Mitchell, now 62, gave a live concert for the musical’s huge fan base there in 2024, and Lam went to finally see his hero in the flesh. 

Asked how he hopes Hedwig will land with Hong Kong’s LGBTQ+ community, Lam wants to talk instead about the musical’s universality: “The show is not about LGBTQ+. It’s not about gender. It’s about humanity and it’s also about love. It’s about how you accept yourself but at the same time accept someone next to you and respect others being themselves.” One of Lam’s lesser known projects is his creative direction of the opening ceremonies of the 11th Gay Games in Hong Kong in 2023. He concedes only that he feels a responsibility to “celebrate” Hong Kong’s older generations who “made a better environment to be a gay person” here.

Lam does share, however, that Hedwig is part of a “love letter to Hong Kong” that he wants to write before he leaves the city in some unscheduled future. “I always say I would like to retire as soon as possible. If it’s my time, I have to do my best and then leave it to the next generation. This is good circulation for the ecosystem.” His husband lives in Canada, and he dreams of setting up a residency there for Hong Kong artists: “We don’t have space here, no matter physical space or mental space,” he says, voicing frustration for the first time.

It only lasts a second though, then he is back to thanking his “luck or blessings” that have helped him in his personal crusade to be the best he can be. When the time comes, he wants to “leave without regrets.” The deaths of his parents and his training in Europe have taught him not to put off until tomorrow what he can do today: “I feel like we cannot take things for granted; there is an expiry date. Maybe this is my time now. Next year, who knows?  If you really love art making, you just do it.”

Carpe diem. For this Ivanhoe too, the quest calls on and on.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch runs from May 10 to 18, 2025, at Freespace in West Kowloon. Click here for more information.