ABSTRACT
Waving my hands in the air, watching Hedwig walk offstage, while the band played its heart out, midst a sea of trance-like fervour amongst the motley crowd, the reality of the dive-like nature of the Jane Street Theatre hit me like a ton of bricks as I stumbled out. The glittery power of the show and the spell cast by its rock ’n’ roll genderqueer heroine and her music could not disguise the fact that in this part of the West Village at night, New York City wore its darkness like an ill-fitting shroud or at best, a battered cloak perhaps left over by a long-ago sailor that stayed once at the Jane Hotel. I called my friend to see if she was staying in for the night, but there was no answer. The person manning the front desk telephone of the hotel said she had stepped out and did not know when she would return. I thought of calling my other friend, the one that rolled the ‘l’ in ‘wild’ when he tipped me off to seeing the show, but I knew he would most definitely be well into his third or fourth party for the night. So, it was just me, heading back to my temporary mid-town sublet, wondering if the feeling of possibility and commonality I experienced in the strange, disconcerting, silly yet oddly profound musical I had just seen – a musical, of all things! – could last and maybe even puncture the concrete veil of commodity culture that had taken hold of this roaring city.
