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If you saw Lena Hall in the 2014 Broadway revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, you haven't forgotten her performance. Scruffed up and grunged out as Hedwig's Croatian boyfriend and sidekick, Yitzhak, she blew the roof off the Belasco Theatre, winning a 2014 Tony Award for her work. After starring with various Hedwigs on the Great White Way—Neil Patrick Harris, Andrew Rannells, Michael C. Hall, John Cameron Mitchell—she took the show on the road in a national tour with Darren Criss, in which she stepped into the title role once a week.
In 2018, Hall has embarked on a year-long project with SKB Records, Obsessed, in which she is releasing a new EP every month, each devoted to a different favorite artist; every week, she is releasing a new music video to go with them. In the first of the EPs, released earlier this month, she puts her stamp on songs from the Hedwig catalog. "I have listened to and sung these songs since I first saw the show in 1999, and Hedwig is a huge part of my life," says Hall. "This album is a love note to Steven Trask and John Cameron Mitchell, and a thank-you to them for writing my all-time favorite show."
We got our hands on an exclusive first look at Hall's newest video, in which she performs Hedwig's grand finale, "Midnight Radio." It's a David Bowie–esque call to concert community, and a superb showcase for the mixture of clean power and rock grit that have made Hall so magnetic as a singer. "This song represents everything I am," she says. "I am a strange rock and roller. It gives me a place to belong in the world and validates who I am. It reminds me of dancing in my bedroom freely as a child, without any restrictions."
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