Actress Katrina Lenk says the show was great, not getting paid wasn't great.

Pity poor Hedwig, the title character in John Cameron Mitchell and Steven Trask’s rock musical, a perpetually mid-op transexual with a stalled career and a broken heart. But pity the show, too: For all the critical plaudits and enthusiastic fans it earned during its original life Off-Broadway, Hedwig and the Angry Inch has had a rocky, stop-and-go existence outside the Big Apple.

A Boston production, backed by entertainment behemoth Pace Entertainment (now Clear Channel), was a critical success but a failure commercially. In Los Angeles, even the backing of glam rock prince David Bowie wasn’t enough to brighten a gloomy box office picture. Even the film version, a Sundance favorite, was overshadowed by Moulin Rouge, a slicker and fancier movie musical.

But it may be that Hedwig’s most surprising failure was in Chicago, where the experimental, gay-themed, rock n’ roll spectacle set up shop in a gay neighborhood of a rock n’ roll town with a decided affinity for experimental theatre. Like Hedwig and her erstwhile beau Tommy Gnosis, show and city just couldn’t work things out. Opening May 24th, 2001, for an announced open run at the Broadway Theatre at Broadway and Belmont, Hedwig was gone by the end of July–and people are still wondering what happened.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch had its official New York premiere, after a long gestation period, at Off-Broadway’s Jane Street Theatre, on Valentine’s Day of 1998. Chief among the half dozen producers at the Jane Street was a legal entity called The Angry Inch, Limited Partnership, the partners being Peter Askin (the director of Hedwig) and a woman named Susann Brinkley.

Askin is a veteran New York director–since Hedwig he’s directed John Leguizamo on Broadway–and Brinkley came to the show as a director and producer with a specialty in new work. She was involved in the founding of the Cherry Lane Alternative Theatre and had been artistic director of Alice’s Fourth Floor, a developmental theatre company that shuttered in the mid-1990’s. Brinkley has been a member for 15 years of the Ensemble Studio Theater (and is currently their acting executive director); Curt Dempster, EST’s artistic director, estimates that Brinkley "has probably produced hundreds of things at various venues over the years." Dempster would not put calls through to Brinkley, who also did not return numerous messages.

Hedwig at the Jane Street was a smash, winning two Obies and an Outer Critics Circle Award, running through 857 performances and four Hedwigs, among them Ally Sheedy. While it was still going strong, interest grew in producing the show in other cities. The rights to license such productions belonged to the above-mentioned Angry Inch LP.

"The Angry Inch LP, as a result of having produced the play for a qualifying number of performances Off-Broadway, maintained production rights in North America for a defined period of time," explains Patrick Herold, who represents John Cameron Mitchell’s authorial rights at Helen Merill, Ltd. So while Hedwig lived in New York, and for one year after its New York closing date, Brinkley and Askin "could mount additional companies in North America, and other people could not unless they expressly granted their permission for it to happen."

While still running in New York, the show was licensed by Angry Inch LP (with Mitchell and Trask’s permission) to Pace Entertainment, which launched a short-lived Boston production in September of 1999, originally intended to be the beginning of a touring company. Concurrent with the Pace arrangement was the Los Angeles production, operated by Canon Theatricals, which was, like Boston, says Herold, "a critical smash and a financial flop."

There were two other productions, in Seattle and Toronto, before Brinkley decided that in 2001 she would exercise her contractual right to produce the show herself. Askin didn’t share that interest, so Brinkley formed her own entity, Susann Brinkley LLC, and assumed the right to produce the show in a handful of cities.

Brinkley’s first stop was Chicago, where she began work on assembling a production early in 2001. Already, time was running out, as she needed to open by May 2001 to retain the rights. When she got to Chicago, she made an audacious move. Rather than license an existing commercial space like the Apollo or the Mercury, Brinkley and her new partners, Job E. Christenson and Daniel Velazquez, took out a five-year lease on a defunct second-run movie house at Broadway and Belmont called the Broadway Theater. They completed minor renovations on the house (noting the show’s gritty appeal, Chris Jones in his Tribune review would write that the theatre "has been made, without anyone working too hard, to look as bombed out as possible) and hurriedly assembled a cast for a one-weekend-only performance in mid-April 2001.

Chicago’s Hedwig was Nick Garrison, who had just closed the Seattle version in February. He remembers being rather hastily inserted into the new version: "I had just finished the show in Seattle, and they were preparing the Chicago production. They had to do like a weekend of previews the month before the show opened in order to secure the theatre and the rights…I was the most recent guy to do it. They hadn’t seen me do the part, but they’d heard of me."

That "weekend of previews" earned Brinkley some grumbles from the authors’ camp, which ultimately controls the rights to the work. "I’m not telling tales out of school when I say that the production in Chicago was a disputed production," says Herold, Mitchell’s literary rep, adding that, ultimately, the production was deemed legitimate. "[Brinkley] rather hastily mounted a performance, which was a pay-what-you-can performance without complete production elements on the eve of the first anniversary of the close of the Jane Street production—just in time to say, 'look…see? I mounted a paid public performance!’ Then proceeded to back pedal and mount a fuller production which opened later."

Official opening night for that later full production, promoted in a series of advance press and advertising, was May 24—all the advance publicity noted the producers’ intentions of running Hedwig indefinitely, and/or putting up other shows at the Broadway. For actress Katrina Lenk, at least, Hedwig was an exciting production, and not just because of the material: In a town where so much of the theatre is in storefronts or basements, the show appeared to be bigger in both budget and ambition.

"They had this director [Joe Witt, production manager on the Jane Street Hedwig] come in from New York, and there was the New York producer…it seemed like a very legitimate operation," Lenk recalls. "It just seemed finally like a really legitimate, sort of Broadway kind of show to be here, in Chicago. And then it just went downhill. Maybe for two weeks we thought that [it was legitimate], then it started to go down and down."

Lenk and her fellow cast members stress their difficulty in getting paid.

"It was about the second week or third week they started having problems paying us. I think it was even during rehearsals," Lenk recalls. "The checks were coming later than they said they would be at first, and there would be these excuses, like 'These checks are coming from New York.’ And they would be for different amounts all the time. I thought I was going to get a certain amount and then the next check would be less—you could never pin them down."

"Pretty early on, people started not getting paid," Garrison agrees, describing the overall working relationship with the production staff as "a nightmare.

"First it was the crew, then the band, then soon my checks were bouncing."

Reviewing her records from the time, Lenk estimates that "they started bouncing on the third week of pay, that’s in rehearsals, and I don’t think there was ever a check after that that didn’t bounce. They’d cover it, usually, with cash or some odd check…from what I can gather they just stopped paying by the last three weeks."

Meanwhile, the show was getting rave reviews, including not one, but two glows in the Chicago Tribune and a "critic’s choice" in the Reader. People were coming, but not enough people to fill the 300-plus seats of the Broadway; and even as the audiences began to improve, the actors’ paychecks were increasingly erratic.

Garrison, in his capacity as Equity representative for the show, led the cast in a walkout midway through the run. "It was basically a 'not show up’ day," he explains. "It’s gone so far, we just said we’re not going on. They had to cancel for a couple days, but they finally coughed up enough money that we agreed to go on."

What was going on behind the scenes is a matter of some confusion, and the people who know aren’t talking: Susann Brinkley did not return calls for this article, Job Christenson did not answer repeated e-mails (and is variously rumored to be living in Montana and in Texas), and Daniel Velazquez simply could not be located. The likeliest explanation, floated by sources close to the production, is that the producers simply hadn’t arranged adequate capital—conservative estimates put advance capitalization for leasing the Broadway, plus all the related costs for a production the size of Hedwig, at $250,000 to $300,000. It’s also been suggested that Christenson and Velazquez, as the local partners to Brinkley’s out-of-town controlling partner, promised a certain amount of capital that never materialized.

From the perspective of Carol Fox, whose company did the publicity for the show, the producers gave themselves neither the time nor the solid financial backing to do the show properly. "This is one of those shows that I felt could have benefited greatly by having some more lead time," she says. "Also, some of the funding, some of the backing did not come in as quickly or as soon as they had anticipated. Had the funding and the backing that they had expected come in on time, it would have made a big difference. We would have been able to plan and follow through with the plan. Not only did we start late, we were constantly revising what we were doing."

There were more basic issues that the Hedwig producers mishandled. For example, advertising a show as an open run is always dangerous, suggesting to potential audiences that they can put off buying their tickets indefinitely. Darren Cole, a Chicago producer who was originally approached by Brinkley as a potential partner, recalls suggesting they mount the show at a smaller, more intimate space, where "Hedwig could be more rock n’ roll, more throw-down." Cole pitched Brinkley on the Funky Buddha lounge. Jonny Polonsky, who led the band, had the same idea: "To start it out, they picked a theatre that was a cool theatre, but it was really large, and then they charged 35 bucks a ticket…the target audience is people who don’t have that kind of money for a show."

Hedwig closed abruptly on July 29th, 2001—the actors showed up to find the light board had been repossessed, and Christenson told them they’d reopen the following weekend. That never happened.

"We liked the show so much," says Lenk, expressing a particular frustration for the cast and band. Even as the production situation spiraled out of control, she says the show was clicking on all cylinders creatively. "That went down to the very end, we loved the show so much and we wanted to keep doing it, that we just kind of took it up the butt."

In the month after closing, the possibility of reopening was kept alive both in the press and in conversations with the cast, by both Christenson and Brinkley. "[There were] major promises from Susann Brinkley in particular, we’re going to get back together, we’re going to go on," says Garrison. "But it never happened. They owe me thousands of dollars. Other people in the production have never been paid. I know there’s still band members who have never been paid."

The actors recouped a portion of their unpaid wages from Actors Equity, which took it out of the bond Brinkley had placed. "We functioned as we normally would," says Kathryn Lamkey, executive director of Actors Equity in Chicago. "When a show closes unexpectedly, as that one did, we check to see if all the obligations to actors had been met. There was outstanding monies owed…and for the most part we were able to secure money for them." Lamkey would only describe the amount repaid as "a fairly sizable amount."

Also stiffed were the publications where Hedwig had placed advertising.

"I don’t really want to get too specific, but I will say that they did run a series of ads that they never paid for," says Reader sales director Lilyan Levant. "It was a lot [of money] by our standards, especially because we require payment in advance by credit card, and they offered us a number of credit cards that were not of any use."

"They definitely did leave some unpaid bills. It was probably under $2,000," says Tracy Baim, publisher of Windy City Times. "Ads ran that did not get paid for. It came through an agency, and normally when an agency books an ad they’re responsible for paying for it."

"My understanding is that there were some unpaid bills," confirms Carol Fox, adding that though her agency handled the contracts, they had a written agreement with Hedwig’s producers that "they were responsible for their own bills."

PerformInk also ran ads for Hedwig through the Carol Fox agency that were never paid for.

These publications and cast members alike have been unsuccessful, in the months since Hedwig’s untimely demise, in recouping any more compensation from the producers. Brinkley has not been responsive, say people from both groups, and Christenson seems to have vanished. "From what I understand he kind of disappeared from the face of the earth," says Garrison.

Yet, surprisingly, no lawsuits against Brinkley or the other producers are on record.

Rumors of a new Hedwig in Chicago began making the rounds early in 2002. Brinkley still controls the rights in Chicago, and writers agent Patrick Herold at Helen Merril reports that she is still planning to do the show there. "As recently as March of this year, and then reaffirmed to me in May of this year, Susann said I’m going to reopen a company in Chicago, then I also want to either leave that company in Chicago or tour that Chicago company, and go to Detroit, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Miami." That tour has yet to materialize, and in June of 2002, Brinkley was officially evicted from the Broadway after allegedly being floated by building owner Sam Markos for almost nine months. In addition, according to Equity’s Lamkey, Brinkley is barred from producing an Equity show until she has repaid her debt to the union.

As of July 2002, the new leaseholders on the Broadway Theatre are a partnership made up of Craig Golden, Chris Ritter, and former Northlight managing director Richard Friedman. They have no plans at present to produce Hedwig and the Angry Inch, although, Ritter reports, the original Chicago production played some role in their move to take over the space.

"It kind of started because I knew through the grapevine that Hedwig had closed for reasons other than audience interest. The show was terrific, I was a big fan of the show, and I had just heard that there were still people interested in seeing it but it closed anyway. And that got me into looking into the space again and inquiring into the production rights. I was interested in possibly remounting it, and in the meantime the space was available."

After a series of conversation with Brinkley, Ritter decided that remounting Hedwig was impractical, but he and his partners have arranged a five-year lease (with the option to extend up to 20 years) on what they’re now calling the Lakeshore Theatre. Their first show, Life’s Not Fair, So What?, opens on October 4th.