Hedwig's and the Angry Inch.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch * Original cast recording * Atlantic

It's been well over a year since Hedwig and the Angry Inch opened off Broadway, knocking the socks off New York theatergoers with a much-needed jolt of twisted bathos and wigged-out histrionics. As its author and star, playing the "internationally ignored" East German chanteuse of dubious gender Hedwig Schmidt, John Cameron Mitchell has rightly created a sensation. Now Mitchell, the show's songwriter Stephen Trask, and Cheater (Trask's band, which appears nightly onstage) have completed the latest phase of their bona fide multimedia juggernaut: a cast album.

Mitchell's drag-inflected glam-rock musical is built on a foundation of seemingly impossible dualities, cannily balancing the edgy and the mundane, the hip and the sincere, the hilarious and the heartbreaking, and, perhaps most of all, theater and rock. Naturally the arrival of a CD would shift the focus away from Mitchell's bravura star turn onstage and toward Trask's much-ballyhooed songs--and the question of whether the CD would emerge as the score of a musical or as a straight-ahead chunk of rock and roll. In keeping with the project's trademark ambiguities, the answer, it happily appears, is both.

Produced by veteran rock-and-roll whiz Brad Wood (who's worked with Liz Phair and the Smashing Pumpkins), the recording is clean, crisp, and hard-driving--more so, perhaps, than one might expect. Hedwig's onstage appeal is visceral; the subtleties of the songwriting are sacrificed nightly to the grungy, glammy ethos of the show itself. Even those who hail Trask's songs find themselves hard-pressed to recall many of the lyrics from amid the scream of distortion, drums, and drag (not to mention the damp acoustics of the venue, the Hotel Riverview's decaying ballroom).

Problem solved. From the outset these tracks fairly hiss with a gloss and clarity that unmask the wit and soul of Trask's songs as well as the performances. Listening to Mitchell's husky tenor intone cleverly subversive lyrics over the tight thrum of Cheater's '70s-style instrumentation, one can finally hear that Trask has been doing as much of a balancing act as Hedwig herself. Indeed, songs this hard-bitten are the heart of rock and roll, but songs this smart are rare outside the theater these days.

For these are undeniably theater songs. They tell a story. They advance the plot. Just as the musical numbers do in Guys and Dolls, Fiddler on the Roof, and The Sound of Music, the songs here give voice to feelings that are too big, too rich, and too complex for words alone. As theater songs should be, they are passionate, telling, and well-wrought. As rock-and-roll tunes, however, they are angry, dirty, and loud. To have achieved both ends simultaneously is very much to Trask's credit.

As the Hedwig legend continues to grow (a movie deal has just been inked), much has been said about bringing the show to the throngs who can't make it to that crumbling hotel in New York's infamous meatpacking district. There are those who treasure the image of the intrepid high school drama queen in some rural burg using the imprimatur of legitimate theater provided by this cast album as an excuse to get himself all done up in drag and to rail about the traumas of crafting one's identity in a post-Cold War, postgay world. But regardless of whether Hedwig helps spark an actual social revolution, at the very least fans of both theater and rock music have an excellent new recording to enjoy.

Fleisher is a musician and performer and the author of The Drag Queens of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide, published by Riverhead Books.