Låt oss vara litet crazy och skriva ett inlägg på engelska här, för att spegla min internationella, emigrerade status:

So, now I've seen Hedwig & the Angry Inch, the musical, three times. Twice at Stockholms Stadsteater (once with a superb view of all the stage from a few rows back, and the second in the first row, *this close* to the stage and all) and once in a whaddya-mean-air-conditioning-cave in Paris.

   Now, I really don't want to compare the two versions, because they are so different and were shown in such different environments (to very dissimilar audiences) that it's simply unnecessary. But, suppose someone walks past me and says that "Stockholm was horrible", and I have no way of - with my lacking French and social skills - defending Farnaz Arbabi's glam Hedwig... how could I not feel obliged to at least try and explain in an unusually international blog entry what makes Stockholm so fabulous, in itself and in comparison with other versions that I've seen (yes, one, to be exact).
   (Still, the whole point of having this blog be in Swedish is I don't want the majority of the Internet to understand what I'm writing, so even if I feel this needs to be in English in order to be slightly less pathetically pointless, a big part of me would kind of prefer that no one read it. But anyways. End  of disclaimer.)

But I'll start by admitting this: Stockholm!Hedwig is different, I myself was puzzled when I first saw it. That's the one that doesn't even try to emulate the classic tiny drag club origins of Hedwig, obviously because Stockholms Stadsteater is anything but, and to attempt to make it look like one isn't only madness but a waste of a - way too big, yes, but - great venue. There's a lot of space which is filled up with lightning, stage design, with drama students/dancers as devoted Hedheads, with beer cans, with colours and glamour. It's different.

   Then there's the fact that if you're going to play on one of the biggest stages in a small country, then you need to appeal to pretty much everyone, the fanatic, the tourist, the average theatre goer. I am still amazed at the fact that they dared take such a chance with a shoe that had never before been played in Sweden and that was - cult in some groups of people but still - relatively unknown. The first time I went I - the fanatic - was of course in seventh heaven, and both my mother - who'd heard so much about it from me - and my aunt-in-law - the Stockholmer - loved it, though I'm not as sure about the old couples or the bitchy culture workers. So the fact that they even did extra shows is... quite extraordinary. But, I drigress.

   What the fact that it was a big theatre production did, expect make the show accessible for people who do not live in a town or have the possibility of planning their lives around a show which has only a few dates (and in my case are too young to get into clubs), was make it possible to have a superb director like Farnaz Arbabi (whose Swedish translation of Hedwig was actually really good) as well as lead characters be played by fantastic performers such as Johannes Bah Kuhnke och Irisl Esell.

Onto Paris then. Temperature-wise, it was hot. That's what I remember the most, really. Along with the fact that there were actually, I think, several, people screaming "no" when Hedwig asked whether we liked her pelt. I don't think I really heard that in Sweden. Does that mean people actually think before yelling? Awesome.

   But anyway, first of all I don't really get the idea of doing the songs in English (with subtitles? in France?), to me that kind of made it feel more like a concert and less like a play, less personal and direct. Plus I had to really restrain myself in order to not sing along to all the songs now that I knew the lyrics (in Sweden it was more like "yeah, that makes sense, that's literal and...what did she just sing?")... But everything that was spoken was however in French, which of course meant I didn't understand everything that wasn't literally translated (what happened to "You, Kant, always get what you want"? I think she said something else) and therefore I shall naturally refrain from commenting on the actual translation which I'm sure was as good as any. Plus as I know there were a lot of jokes in Swedish Hedwig that were very much aimed at a Swedish audience, I probably didn't know to appreciate half of the cultural references in French.

   Another thing that I didn't understand was the role of Yitzhak - I might have missed something, but to me he looked a bit like... comic relief, and just didn't have that butch macho calm&quietness about him that I would have expected. He didn't really appeal to my inner (latent) drag king groupie. And was I dreaming, or did another of the band members sing The Long Grift, Yitzhak being more like the back up-singer? Because that was actually - in my opinion - one of the highlights in Stockholm, Iris Esell singing "Ditt stora spel" (as I think it was called in Swedish) to a mesmerized audience.

So now, that said, slightly puzzling thins aside, and even if I wasn't, say, flabbergasted (since I never write in English nowadays, I just had to use that word) by its awesomeness, I immensely enjoyed the French version of Hedwig & the Angry Inch. The music is fantastic, that's a fact, the story wonderful, and it was all perfectly well performed in a venue which was hot but undeniably fabulous. Plus it feels good to have seen a Classic Hedwig, as well as only the pimped up glammed up institutional theatre version.

But you know how people always seem to be really conservative about whatever version of a musical/song/movie they saw first? (Like how so many *cough* old *cough* people seem to passionately hate Jesus Christ Superstar 2000, except me who didn't see the original until way later.) I can relate to that.

   Farnaz Arbabi's was my first (live) Hedwig, and partly therefore I love her the most. Forgive the pretentiousness of what I'm about to say, but in hat time in my life, in that city, that show broke my heart and put it back together again better.