Inside ‘Riverdale’s Ambitious ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’ Musical Episode

“I was born on the other side / of a town ripped in two / I made it over the great divide / Now I’m coming for you.”

Those are the opening lyrics to Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a cult classic musical that — while perhaps not as universally famous as, say, Guys and Dolls or Cats — has still played in theaters all over the world, won multiple Tony Awards, and was adapted into a 2001 feature film that led to a Golden Globe nomination for Mitchell, who also stars as the titular Hedwig. Focused on an East German, trans rock singer, Hedwig is alternately outrageous, deeply romantic, uplifting, and heartbreaking; often all at the same time. It’s also probably not the first musical you’d think of as being the perfect fit for adaptation by The CW’s Riverdale.

“It wasn’t really until Stephen Trask, the composer and lyricist of Hedwig, reached out to my office and said, ‘Stephen’s a hug fan of the show, he’d love to compose music for the show,'” Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, showrunner for Riverdale told Decider over the phone, “and then in the room we were like… ‘Guys, should we do Hedwig?'”

The episode inspired by and including musical numbers from Hedwig and the Angry Inch airs this Wednesday, April 15 at 8/7c on The CW. Originally scheduled for April 8 after an already nearly month-long break from the show, the episode titled “Chapter Seventy-Four: Wicked Little Town” was delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic scrambling post-production and network schedules. It’s part of a now yearly tradition for the Archie Comics inspired series, one that started with Season 2’s Carrie: The Musical episode, “A Night to Remember,” and then was followed through in Season 3 with the Heathers: The Musical inspired “BIG FUN.” Both previous episodes effortlessly weaved the ongoing plot of the series with a Riverdale High production of each musical. And all three episodes have one main thing in common: Riverdale writer Tessa Leigh Williams, who co-wrote “A Night to Remember” with Arabella Anderson, before writing “BIG FUN” and “Wicked Little Town” solo.

According to Aguirre-Sacasa, Williams pitched Heathers last year; but this year, it took Trask’s interest, and listening to the score to sell the staff on Hedwig being the right choice. “So many of the songs, like ‘Wicked Little Town’ and ‘Midnight Radio’ and ‘The Origin of Love,’ besides being amazing songs, felt like songs that could describe Riverdale,” Aguirre-Sacasa recalled.

“It just felt like undeniably the right choice for us this year,” Williams added.

For those a little behind on their Riverdale, here’s the gist of the setup for this year’s spectacular. After 16 episodes of being menaced by an elite school named Stonewall Prep that found Jughead Jones (Cole Sprouse) faking his own death, the kids of Riverdale are all back in school and ready to tackle the end of their Senior Year. For Jughead, who went missing for a few weeks with the whole “fake death” thing, and Archie Andrews (KJ Apa), who has been moonlighting as a vigilante while managing a community center and his departed father‘s construction business, that means some intense catch-up if they hope to graduate on time. Veronica Lodge (Camila Mendes), meanwhile, is still reeling from the shocking news that her father Hiram (Mark Conseulos) is dying of a degenerative neuromuscular disorder. And Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart) is dealing with another issue entirely, one that has sent fans of the show into a frenzy of speculation: could a fake relationship with Archie designed to throw the Stonewall Prep kids off Jughead’s tracks have developed into something more?

Even with all that in mind, Hedwig is a challenge. Unlike the movie adaptation musicals of previous years, Hedwig (mostly) takes place on one set, and (mostly) revolves around one character telling stories through song: Hedwig herself. Taking that and expanding it out to the Riverdale cast — and plot — involved one major hurdle to begin with: clearing the idea by Trask.

“We had to talk to Stephen and say, ‘Hey we wanna do Hedwig, but we really wanna change it up and there’s not gonna be one Hedwig; everyone’s gonna be taking a song,'” Aguirre-Sacasa noted. “And Stephen was fine with that. Again, he really did let us make Hedwig our own.”

(Trask’s reaction to the news, once it was officially announced? “I’m kvelling.”)

With Trask’s blessing to mix up the basic DNA of the musical, the next step was figuring out how to execute on the show, particularly given the plot of Hedwig. In the show, Hedwig gets a back-alley castration that goes horribly wrong, leading to the “angry inch” of the title. For a series that featured Archie briefly getting murdered by a bear and an evil role-playing game that ran on candy drugs, perhaps this sort of story isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility; but potentially problematic for a show without trans characters, and particularly for a series that has been awarded in the past for its LGBTQ+ representation.

Notably, though, John Cameron Mitchell himself has downplayed the idea that Hedwig is about the trans experience, despite some initial readings of the material in that direction. “He was a boy who was quite comfortable in his gender and was coerced into a mutilation, really, by a boyfriend, mother and really the patriarchy, if you think about it,” Mitchell told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview last year. “[Coerced by] the binarchy that says you have to be one or the other for certain things to happen, for you to get married and so on… But it’s not really a trans story.”

Still, the team at Riverdale wanted to be as respectful with their adaptation as possible, so reached out to GLAAD to discuss Hedwig. After informing them of the plan to adapt the show, over two decades after it opened Off-Broadway, according to Aguirre-Sacasa the GLAAD rep responded that, “‘The less that you present Hedwig as an anthem for transgender persons probably the better, since it’s a complicated and potentially problematic narrative.’ So we said, ‘Oh thats great, we’re really not going there at all, really we’re focusing on Hedwig as an anthem of the outsider and as a drag persona and a flamboyant persona, flouting convention.’

“GLAAD’s take on Hedwig and John Cameron Mitchell’s take on Hedwig totally jived with what we were doing,” Aguirre-Sacasa continued, “so it was a nice confirmation that we could proceed with the version of the story that we were telling.”

There were other issues to get beyond, though. Previous musical episodes have had the artifice of the students performing musical numbers because they’re, you know, performing in a musical. Additionally, both Heathers and Carrie have the added bonus of being musicals about and set in high schools. Hedwig, decidedly, does not have any of those features. And to make things more difficult, “Wicked Little Town,” kicks off with Kevin Keller (Casey Cott) wanting to perform a number from Hedwig at the school’s talent show. Instead, he’s shut down by the iron-fisted new principal Mr. Honey (Kerr Smith), leading to a school-wide rebellion. So no high school, multiple characters… And no musical.

Instead, the Riverdale team looked to Hedwig‘s songs for, “the mood and the psychology of the characters rather than necessarily advancing hard story,” noted Aguirre-Sacasa. Not necessarily a revolutionary technique for the concept of musicals, which are often based all around the idea that the characters feel such strong emotions they have no choice but to siiiiing; but definitely a departure from the previous years’ outings.

“We’ve learned a lot over the years in terms of how to balance scene work with musical numbers,” Williams said. “Our scenes have to be shorter with the musical numbers, because you want the music to shine and be the focus … to really do a lot of the storytelling for you.”

It’s not just the music or the plot, of course: musicals are also all about dance, something that the even on a regular week the musical number friendly Riverdale knows well. That means for Williams it’s also all about allowing the story to work with the movement and choreography. And even with all that preparation? Staying as loose as possible, once it becomes time to film. “On set it’s always just a really fun, wild ride,” Williams added.

What’s involved in that wild ride? Williams ran down part of the process for us:

After what she calls the “standard script steps” in order to get a script on its feet, a separate document is created involving all of the music and lyrics involved in the musical portion of the episode. The writers (including Williams) will go through the lyrics and assign them out, based on what makes sense for plot and the characters themselves.

They’ll also text the actors to ask what they want to sing.

“I remember I texted Casey Cott who plays Kevin and I said, ‘We’re thinking of doing Hedwig, what Hedwig songs do you want?'” Aguirre-Sacasa recalled, “and he immediately texted back ‘Tear Me Down’ and ‘Wig in a Box’.”

Added Williams, “A similar thing sort of happened with Cole, when we were talking about who wanted to sing what song, he loves ‘Origin of Love’ — that’s one of his favorite songs, he said. That was very clear, that it’ll work for him.”

Once those songs are assigned, lyrics and other pieces of the songs get cut for time. But simultaneously, two versions of each song are created; one for the show as it’s going to be shot, and another, longer version that’s released later online on Spotify, iTunes and other streaming music sites. Because of this, the lyrics get written out in the script, and interspersed with dialogue, and separate song sheets need to be created to work off of, for both the longer and shorter versions.

After that’s all sorted, the team goes off to record the music in order to get “the playback tracks that we’re then using on the day when we’re recording,” followed by the final mixes afterwards. Then it’s over to choreographer Heather Gray, who has worked on all three musical episodes. Gray will put together a “skeleton crew version” with her and her dancers, in order to show the behind the scenes team what they’re thinking. Once that’s approved, it’s over to the cast to start putting it all together.

Even with all those steps, there was one, big, extra step for “Wicked Little Town”: the wigs. “We were very lucky to have the time to do hair and makeup tests as well, because there are so many different looks,” Williams said. “There’s a ton of different hair and makeup, wigs, very different looks from what we normally do.”

Aguirre-Sacasa added that a musical episode is “easily double the work” of the already technically complicated episodes of Riverdale. Normally, a writer will be on set while shooting their episode. For the musical, Williams was sent up a week early to “dial everything in.”

“What’s nice is… The musical episode is basically everyone’s favorite episode every year,” Aguirre-Sacasa continued, “so people really rally and go the extra mile.”

That goes double in the middle of a global pandemic: when we spoke to Aguirre-Sacasa and Williams, the team was still working on the final mixes for songs, even two weeks out from the original air date.

When the final product airs, it will still have some of the noir darkness Riverdale is known for (Aguirre-Sacasa noted that including at least some of the mystery element is “the truest version of a Riverdale musical episode”); but for the most part is a celebration full of music, joy and romance, a rarity for the dark CW series.

“We had just wrapped up a very complicated, dense, knotted mystery with Stonewall Prep,” Aguirre-Sacasa said, “so it did feel like we wanted to do something fresh and new and fun.”

Part of that fresh, new fun? A classic bit from the Archie Comics source material that, thus-far, has never appeared on screen on Riverdale: The Archies. Though a proto-version of the band appeared as The Fred Heads in the Season 3 flashback episode “The Midnight Club,” the classic band line-up has been absent, despite one of the original pitches for Riverdale building up to a battle of the bands between The Archies and Josie and the Pussycats, instead of murder and mayhem.

“We’ve been talking about doing The Archies band literally since the pilot,” Aguirre-Sacasa continued, “And we realized, ‘Oh my god, we’ve only got four more episodes of these guys in high school. If we don’t do The Archies now we are never going to do it.’ And it was funny, back when we started Riverdale there was almost this directive of not dealing with high school stuff a lot, because high school shows had gone out of vogue. This year, when we were nearing the end of the season, both the studio and network were like, ‘Well you’re gonna do the high school band, right? You’re doing The Archies.’ So it was sort of like, ‘Oh my god, we have to do this right now.’ That was one of the imperatives.”

Building “Wicked Little Town” around the squeaky clean band that spawned real life hits like “Sugar, Sugar” might seem an odd fit for a counter-culture curio like Hedwig and the Angry Inch. But in a strange way, it calls very specifically back to the original staging and script of the musical, itself. Just a band, playing in front of a crowd, on a relatively bare stage, talking — and singing — about love. And it also calls back to the closing song of the show in particular: “Midnight Radio,” which pays tribute to the full history of music, and rock n’ roll, of which The Archies are a long and storied part. Or as the final lyrics of Hedwig more eloquently say:

“And you’re spinning / Your new 45’s / All the misfits and the losers / Well, you know you’re rock and rollers / Spinning to your rock and roll / Lift up your hands / Lift Up Your Hands.”

Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on The CW.

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