The World Needs Hedwig Again: Seann Miley Moore Electrifies in a Blistering Australian Revival.

Melbourne. Sydney. The cosmos. Hedwig and the Angry Inch has crash-landed once more - and she’s not here to make nice.

As the global pendulum swings hard toward regressive policies and queer rights face renewed assault - from anti-trans legislation in the US to moral panics closer to home - Hedwig and the Angry Inch returns not as nostalgia, but as a cultural counterpunch. It’s not just timely - it’s necessary, furious, and fabulous.

This 2025 Australian revival, co-directed by Shane Anthony and Dino Dimitriadis, arrives with glitter on its knuckles and a snarl in its soul. At its core is Seann Miley Moore as Hedwig - a genderqueer glam-rock oracle who’s part prophet, part punk diva, and wholly unforgettable. Moore doesn’t just command the stage - they dismantle it plank by plank, with a voice that shapeshifts from satin to sandpaper, and a presence that’s part Bowie, part Beyoncé, and 100% ballistic.

This Hedwig isn’t a cabaret act. She’s an exorcism. A subversive sermon. A rhinestone-studded reckoning with identity, power, loss, and the inconvenient truths we stitch into our skin.

And she’s got stories - oh honey, does she have stories.

This isn’t karaoke - it’s an exorcism in heels.

With vocals that veer from gutter-glam snarl to operatic euphoria, Seann Miley Moore delivers Stephen Trask’s cult-classic score (Tear Me Down, The Origin of Love, Midnight Radio) not just with bruised brilliance but with a kind of radical emotional excavation. Every note lands like a confession wrapped in sequins.

One moment they’re spitting fire like a dive-bar punk messiah, the next they’re caressing melodies with a tenderness so raw it borders on dangerous. This isn’t mere vocal prowess - it’s emotional cartography. Moore doesn’t just sing Hedwig - they bleed her.

And then there’s Adam Noviello as Yitzhak - less sidekick, more suppressed scream in a wig. With a brooding physicality and a gaze that could slice through steel, Noviello stalks the edges of the stage like a wounded lion, nursing dreams deferred and dignity denied. Their presence is both counterpoint and crescendo to Moore’s wild glitter-flecked storm. When Noviello finally breaks free in a climactic drag reveal - a moment staged with more heat than hope - it doesn’t feel like just a transformation, but a resurrection. Yitzhak doesn’t "become" - they reclaim.

The chemistry between Moore and Noviello doesn’t so much simmer as smoulder, spark, and periodically explode. It’s not neat, and certainly not nostalgic - this is the kind of connection forged in the crucible of co-dependence, ego, and unmet longing. Think Sid and Nancy if they could harmonise. Their dynamic is laced with tension, trauma, and a queasy kind of affection that feels like it could tip into tenderness or total annihilation at any moment. Love, in Hedwig, is a battlefield - but also a band rehearsal gone gloriously off the rails.

What sets this revival apart isn’t just its feral theatricality or the sweat-slicked intimacy of the Carriageworks staging and Rising Festival debut - it’s the way it plants Hedwig’s story squarely in the now. This isn’t some retro glam-rock fantasia with a tragic trans clown at its centre. The Tennessee dive bar where she sings her guts out isn’t a theatrical device - it’s a pressure cooker, one that echoes chillingly with the real-world noise of bathroom bills, drag bans, and the steady erosion of trans and queer rights across so-called liberal democracies.

In this telling, Hedwig isn’t just a fallen star with a botched operation and a broken heart - she’s a prophet in fishnets, dragging the audience through a wasteland of gender, trauma, and survival with mascara-streaked ferocity. The Berlin Wall may have fallen, but Hedwig knows another one is rising - brick by bigoted brick - and she’s not just here to sing about it. She’s here to tear it down.

And yet, Hedwig and the Angry Inch has never just been about glitter, wigs, or a botched operation - it’s always been a howl from the margins, a jagged meditation on identity, survival, and the aching mess of becoming. Beneath the glam-rock swagger lies something far rawer: a brutal poetry of rejection, reinvention, and the stubborn insistence on existing out loud, even when the world tells you to shrink.

John Cameron Mitchell’s book still slices with surgical precision - one minute winking with filthy, footlight humour, the next sucker-punching with truths too tender to whisper. It’s a script that doesn’t just age well - it ages angrily, revealing new bruises and battle cries each time it’s performed.

This 2025 production doesn’t dilute the rage or sand down the edges - it sharpens them. This is Hedwig with its teeth bared and its knuckles painted. A glitter bomb with a manifesto. A primal scream wrapped in a feather boa and hurled, unapologetically, into a world still trying to legislate her out of existence.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Shane Reid.