When Darren Criss was starring in Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Broadway, he could hear his parents in the audience laughing at one risque joke or another. "And I'd be, like, guys, what I just said was terrible. You should be scolding me." His parents may be "a little bit old-fashioned," but after his run as the transgendered rocker had ended, "My mom was always telling me, 'I miss Hedwig. I miss Hedwig.' Had you told my 16-year-old self that my mom would be anticipating the next time I got to do this character in this movie I was watching in the basement, I'd say you're crazy."
Starting Oct. 2, Criss' mother will get her wish, and she'll only have to travel across town to the Golden Gate Theatre, rather than across the continent. Hedwig and the Angry Inch is beginning its post-Broadway tour in his hometown, and Criss made sure that he would be part of it as soon as he got wind of it. He'll play Hedwig in San Francisco and then Los Angeles before it travels on with another actor as its star.
"The thought of someone else doing it in San Francisco just seemed so wrong," Criss said by phone from New York, where he was in rehearsals for the upcoming run. "By the time my run on Broadway was over, I just didn't feel done with the role, and the fact that I get to resurrect it in my hometown is a very poetic way to finally put the heels aside. It's a full-circle moment for me."
Criss got his start on San Francisco stages before he had even reached his teen years, including three musicals with 42nd Street Moon. "It was my first interaction with any kind of professional theater," he said, "and I think it made me grow up faster than a lot of my peers because I was at the theater with 30somethings, and staying out late, and going with them to a diner after rehearsals."
In those days, he was playing urchins, orphans and babes on Broadway, and he would become the youngest of the six actors to play Hedwig on Broadway during its recent run. He began lobbying to play Hedwig from the moment he heard that the John Cameron Mitchell-Stephen Trask musical was headed to Broadway in 2014 with Neil Patrick Harris as its star. "I did everything in my power to do it, and I mean everything," he said. "In fact, it would have been sooner had I not been shooting Glee ."
The role of the "internationally ignored song stylist" from East Germany, "a slip of a girlyboy" before a botched sex-change operation, was quite a leap from his role as a schoolboy on Glee. He joined the cast of the hit show in its second season as the wholesomely gay Blaine Anderson, who became the love interest of another gay glee-clubber in a storyline that led to their marriage by the time the series ended in 2015.
Glee instantly sent his career into orbit, and earned him special attention in the gay community. He "came out" as straight in 2011 because, he told Out magazine, "I think it's more empowering to everybody, including myself, if I'm articulate about identifying myself as a straight male playing a gay character."
In Hedwig, he's playing a character of indefinable sexuality who arrives on stage looking like a woman and makes a final exit as a man. In-between, the audience learns her story during a concert, as the musical moves between monologues and glam-rock songs. Hedwig shares the stage with her husband and backup singer, Yitzhak, a former drag queen whom she both depends on and abuses. Lena Hall, another San Francisco native, won a Tony Award for her performance as Yitzhak. She had left the Broadway production by the time Criss joined it, but she's returning to the show for the SF and LA runs.
"We both kind of lean to the rock-n-roll sides of our singing," Criss said, "so to be able to put those two things together is fun, and it makes it something new for both of us. She worked with a lot of different actors as Hedwig, so now she's kind of reconfiguring her muscle memory to what I do." Hall will also play Hedwig at one performance a week, with an understudy taking her place as Yitzhak.
"The cool thing about doing the show on tour is that we've had a year-and-a-half to reconsider a lot of things that were locked in on Broadway," he said. "After notes today, I said, 'How come you never said that to me the last time, because I would have played it completely differently?' And it was, like, oh yeah, at the time we were just trying to get you into the show. I was taking from the hodgepodge of the actors who had come before me, but now we've all had a clean reset."
Not that Criss didn't feel like he made the role his own on Broadway. "I never felt like I was doing someone else's show. There were plenty of moments that were definitely unique to me. The role has been added to and taken away from by all the people who have done Hedwig, and it's fun to be part of that small club."
When Criss first joined the Broadway company, a joke was inserted that acknowledged that he was a younger Hedwig than his predecessors. "It never got any response," said the 29-year-old actor. "The people were, like, why did you take me out of the story? It was jarring. Whatever the age of the actor, Hedwig comes on full force and you're transported into her story. It's the kind of part that just possesses whoever's playing it."
Hedwig and the Angry Inch will run Oct. 2-30 at the Golden Gate Theatre. Tickets are $55-$212. Call (888) 746-1799 or go to shnsf.com.