PES’s fun food-related shorts are completely work safe and kid-friendly — which is more than you can say for his hilarious “Roof Sex,” which features furniture instead of food, as well as a killer punchline.

2) Los Angeles duo No Age performs at Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery.

3) Hector Manuel Sagunto continues at Art Space International.

4) The Five Spot hosts the 4th of U-Lie concert, featuring NY Oil, Ishues, Stacy Epps and more.

5) APEX Museum screens its July Movies with a Mission, The Lion Mountains: A Journey Through Sierra Leone History.

(Photo by Monica Holder)

There are a lot of reasons for this, some of which speak to how audiences — both gay and straight — related to both traditional musical theater and rock ’n’ roll. The best thing about Hedwig and the Angry Inch is how it can unite all theater-going (and some non-theater-going) audiences.I became obsessed with Hedwig when, as the A&E editor for Gambit Weekly down in New Orleans, I profiled the actor Flynn De Marco and the theater troupe he co-founded with Richard Read, Running With Scissors. Under the tutelage of an excellent local director, Carl Walker, they turned Hedwig from a typical month-long summer production into a nearly four-month phenomenon back in 2001. I also was fortunate to catch Actor’s Express’ production in 2003, as well as a rather humble one in Biloxi, Miss.

Rock ’n’ roll has had a rather sketchy relationship with musical theater over the years. From the moment Bye Bye Birdie hit the Great White Way back in 1961, there was always the feeling that rock music just didn’t quite fit in with the “Let’s put on a show!” fabulousness of musicals. (It might be worth noting that Charles Strouse, the man behind the music of Bye Bye Birdie, also scored Annie.) For years, it was as if rock was an oddity to Broadway.

Then came the late 1970s, and a trio of now-kitschy stabs at rock ’n’ roll: Hair (1972), Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), and Godspell (1977). Time and time again, Broadway kept dancing around the edges of rock — the R&B inflections, the psychedelic trances, the ’60s idealism — but not the guts of rock. These musicals felt like they were more about an era, the ’60s, than a genre, forgetting how inextricably interwoven the two were.

“Musical theatre has only paid lip-service to rock ’n’ roll — in large part because they’re different audiences,” says Read. “Rock ’n’ roll isn’t scripted, it’s messy by nature. All those musicals you mention — they’re choreographed to within an inch of their lives. Hedwig is messy. Also, it’s actually staged as a rock show, as opposed to simply containing rock music. That helps push the rock vibe.”

It wasn’t until Richard O’Brien’s brilliant 1973 British musical The Rocky Horror Show came over to the States in 1975 that rock felt at least a little bit more organically developed — even if Rocky too was more satire than homage. One could argue, though, that this being the first musical with a more true gay sensibility at work, the lines between satire and homage blurred much more so than they did with Bye Bye Birdie — or even, say, 1980’s Grease. (And 1985’s spectacular Dreamgirls was more about black rhythm & blues’ uneasy relationship with rock ’n’ roll than rock itself.)

This is where camp also demands to be taken more seriously from an emotional context. The freaks of The Rocky Horror Show hint that their freakishness goes beyond a silly lab experiment and to a planet far, far away — from mainstream culture. In the closing song, “Super Heroes,” Frank N Furter laments, “I’ve done a lot/God knows I’ve tried/To find the truth/I’ve even lied/But all I know/Is down inside/I’m bleeding.” We all may laugh at ourselves when we play dress-up at the midnight-movie screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but there’s something undeniably serious going on here, something with a rock ’n’ roll edge. It may be a bit silly, a bit drag-queenish, but it’s very real.

Rent (1996) tried desperately to feel authentic, but it rings so hollow I can barely discuss the musical. Many probably believe this was the rock tragedy everyone’s been waiting for, but looking at Generation X through a La Boheme lens felt so incredibly artificial and so self-conscious, I could barely hang on after intermission the time I saw the Broadway touring show. (Indeed, the musical felt more concerned about the timelessness of opera than rock.) In one of the great ironies of musical theater, the late Jonathan Larson’s attempt at capturing the authenticity of the Greenwich Village scene did almost the exact opposite, with everyone a “type” and no one a real person.

Even more ironically, Hedwig — with her “Barbie Doll crotch” and her absurd life story and her elliptical future — is as real as it gets, and that’s partly because the rock ’n’ roll in Hedwig is as real as it gets. Certainly derivative, it’s more importantly reverential to a genre and a heroine who is one of the losers that glam rock embraces in its draggy garb.

This may come off as incredibly homophobic, but I also believe it took the “right” kind of gay artists in the musical-theater world to embrace the “right” kind of rock ’n’ roll. While Mitchell came up through first traditional and more off-Broadway productions, Stephen Trask was a member of the house band at a New York drag club called Squeezebox, which performed for everyone from Joey Ramone to Debbie Harry.

In tackling the punk/glam genre from which sprouted David Bowie, the Velvet Underground and Roxy Music, Mitchell and Trask tapped into the first real sub-genre of rock that appealed to a gay and/or bisexual audience, as opposed to those who were attracted to more traditional musical theater.

The alienation that is one of the hallmarks of true rock ’n’ finally proved that it can be the same alienation that is the hallmark of being gay in America. Hedwig finally connected the two.

“There’s no question that gays and musical theater go hand in hand,” Read says. “We’re not the only ones who enjoy it, mind you, but we do, and we help make it happen. However, I think a lot of gays have a much dicier relationship with rock ’n’ roll; it can be awfully homophobic at times — or at least off-puttingly heterocentric. And to be honest, I don’t even think of glam rock as “gay”; it just gave straight guys the chance to put on makeup.

“It’s hard for some gays to get into rock because they have trouble finding groups or singers with whom to identify,” Read continues. “Those of us who enjoy it have to look past all that and enjoy the music for what it is. As far as Hedwig goes, it was definitely a rock show where gays could fit in. It was also really good, true rock music — as opposed to that mediated, wussified crap in Godspell.”

In my review, I suggest that Craig Waldrip as Hedwig comes up a bit short in his performance as Hedwig, and I hope he doesn’t take the criticism too hard. Because the good news is, Hedwig herself is used to taking shots; just listen to “Tear Me Down.” Bloodied and bruised, she always picks herself up and keeps on rocking. That’s what rock ’n’ roll is all about. Finally, that’s what musical theater is about.

(Hedwig/Actor’s Express photo by Coosa Valley Photography; Hedwig/film photo courtesy Fine Line Pictures; Godspell and Rocky Horror photos courtesy Amazon.com)

In the world according to Jay Louis, there’s no such thing as too many douchebags. No, not the countless politicos that Jon Stewart likes to skewer on “The Daily Show,” but the tatted-up, hair-spiked, shiny-foreheaded, six-pack-packed, hand-symbol-thrusting, shades-sporting, wife-beater-wearing, tongue-thrusting, hand-gesturing and pec-bearing American men who somehow wind up with really attractive women in living color.

Louis, aka douchebag1, hosts the phenomenally popular website Hot Chicks with Douchebags, in which he and alert readers hip the rest of us “normal” folk to the cheesily over-packaged American men hanging out with women who would seem way out of their league. As popular as the site is, the next logical step would seem to be a book, Hot Chicks with Douchebags (Simon Spotlight Entertainment), which fell into our reluctant hands this week and will hit bookstores July 8. The book’s thesis seems simple enough:

In this book, we will identify every type of ’bag within the douche spectrum, from the youthful stage-1 Fratbags to the polluted, noxious stage-4 DJ Club Douche. We will tap directly into the core of not only how douchebaggery manifests, but also how it corrupts the hottie within its wily, greased-up charms. These unnatural cohabitations must be exposed to the disinfecting light of detailed scrutiny if we have any hope of societal redress.

Louis fancies himself a culture critic; his diary-style blog posts are laced with heady name-dropping that actually lead nowhere: “Lighting up a stogie and pouring a shot of rum for Jobu, I contemplated the famous words of 16th Century astronomer Tyco Brahe, who stared up at the Prague skyline one night and casually remarked, ‘I have to pee.’ So I peed.”

It’s all kind of dismissive, smug and superior in a Greg Behrendt/He’s Just Not That Into You kind of way that isn’t nearly as female-empowering as the title suggests. (Women don’t exactly come off that well either.) But HCWD is at its funniest when coming up with the seemingly endless labels for these poor creatures: The Greasy Euro-Douche, The Garden Gnome, The Furry-Man, The “He’s My Best Friend” ’Bag,” and so on. The book’s denouement suggests a 12-step program of “De-Douchification,” which starts with “Accept That You or Your Loved One is a ’Bag” and concludes with “Disband the Woo Hotties and Douche Scrums,” a form of bold group disassociation that would appear to be the height of naivete. (These douches ain’t going away anytime soon.)

Ground Zero for the douchebag, according to Louis, is former ’90s power couple Richard Grieco and “Baywatch” babe Yasmine Bleeth, whose tragic tale is recounted in these pages. It’s all not nearly as funny as Louis thinks he is, but the photos of them, and all the other douchebags/hotties, suggests incontrovertible evidence of their existence.

Now, if we could get a book featuring Dick Cheney, Lord High Douchebag, and his minions, we’d be getting somewhere. But I fear we’ll never see Condi in a thong.

(Photos courtesy Simon Spotlight Entertainment)

A higher-res version is here.

“Edginess is relative however, and I hope that I can tempt you to attend Noises Off by letting you know you will be attending the first production in Aurora Theatre history to feature the f-word. Doesn’t that seem worth the drive?”

Aurora is billing Noises Off as “the greatest farce ever written,” and while that’s a bold statement that encompasses centuries of theater history, I have trouble thinking of a farce that’s better constructed or more ingenious. Famed critic Frank Rich called and said that it “is, was, and probably always will be the funniest play written in my lifetime.” Aurora’s cast includes Megan Hayes (pictured), Robert Egizio and Jeff McKerley, and the combination certainly sounds worth the drive.

Although Frayn is probably best known for Noises Off, two of my favorite Frayn works are a little more scholarly. His cerebral historical drama Copenhagen dramatizes a 1941 meeting with Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his German protege, Werner Heisenberg, and concerns Nazis, atom-smashing and the morality of science in war-time. One of my favorite recent novels is Headlong, Frayn’s hilarious account of a blocked writer who grows obsessed with the possibility that his neighbor unwittingly owns an undiscovered Brueghel painting worth a fortune. It’s the kind of thoughtful and funny book I feel confident recommending to practically anyone.

(Photo courtesy of Aurora Theatre)

The collection, edited by frequent New Yorker contributing cartoonist Liza Donnelly, is a far-ranging offering of female artists’ takes on women and sex in the New Millennium. Often insightful, usually funny and sometimes downright strange, Sex and Sensibility proves that when it comes to sex, the fairer sex gets the last laugh more often than we think. It’s a breezy slice of feminist empowerment.

The phenomenon of female cartoonists is a relatively new one, Donnelly writes in her introduction: “While women can — and have for generations — painted and sculpted in the privacy of their studios, women cartoonists have had a tough road. The cartoonist has to be aware of what others find funny, and work with that while staying true to the cartoonist’s voice. And, to be published, the cartoonist has to be aware of the editor’s sense of humor. Historically, magazine editors have been men, who upheld tradition in most cases.”

But as this collection proves, women are getting in on the act, most notably the ubiquitous Donnelly. My particular favorites in this book include Marisa Acocella Marchetto and Ann Telnaes, whose drawings feel a bit more fleshed out and filled in than those that skew closer to the New Yorker minimalist style. Marchetto’s style borders on the street ’zine mood, with lots of brooding frowns, lines filled in with dark shades. In one cartoon, a mini-skirted, long-haired blonde stands disaffected while holding her cell phone to her ear. Her gaze is away from the phone and right into the barrel of her balding partner’s pistol. “Oh shit,” she laments to her friend on the other line, “my husband wants to have sex.”

Telnaes, by contrast, seems heavily influenced by the sharp, almost-thick and often broad lines of Al Hirschfeld with a dash of Art Deco thrown in for good measure. In one scene, a middle-age man dining with his lady friend spies a pregnant peer walking by their cafe dining table, all smiles. The man harrumphs: “HAVING A BABY AT AGE 60 — HOW RIDICULOUS. CAN’T SHE JUST ACCEPT GETTING OLDER??” His companion, all fake-boobed and coiffed, sips on her martini with a shirt that brags “ARM CANDY.”

Again, feel free to email us for your free copy. You’ve just got to love generous publicists. Thanks, Twelve!

So in this war of viral videos, who’s the winner? (Spoilers follow)

Advantage: Silverman!

It’s not that they’re not both funny. And it’s not that getting busy with Matt Damon has more cachet than getting busy with Ben Affleck (although Damon’s arguably more talented and successful, Ben’s respectable directorial work in Gone Baby Gone notwithstanding). It’s just that “I’m F*cking Matt Damon” is a better executed clip than “I’m F*cking Ben Affleck.” Silverman and Damon are better singers and you can understand pretty much every word they sing. In Kimmel’s clip, the muddier vocals, more extensive bleeping and more obtrusive audience laughter steps on some of the jokes. Plus, Damon delivers a hilarious, energetic performance in his own right, while Affleck doesn’t really get the chance to cut loose in the same way.

It’s a close one, though: The “We Are the World” concept, with guests from Don Cheadle to McLovin, is absolutely brilliant, and I’d possibly give the advantage to Kimmel if I knew who everyone was. And it’s always a welcome surprise to be reminded that Harrison Ford has a sense of humor.

It would probably be for the best if it stops here, though.

Incidentally, in case you don’t know these people, Sarah Silverman is a spectacularly raunchy comedian (see her concert film Jesus Is Magic) and the longtime girlfriend of late, late night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel, who recently celebrated his fifth anniversary on the air.

Atlanta-based actor/writer/performance artist Scott Turner Schofield brings his new one-man show, Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps, to Little Five Points’ 7 Stages from Jan. 31-Feb. 3. It’s entirely possible that the title is both playful and literal, since Schofield, formerly Kt Kilborn, is a woman-to-man transgender artist and his energetic, accessible work explores his personal transition. Reportedly he lowers himself from the ceiling to begin a show that he calls, “a roller coaster ride through your heart, your soul, and your genitals!”

I wrote the Creative Loafing cover story “I Changed My Sex. Now What?” on Schofield in 2006, and found him to be not only extremely likable, but a candid, illuminating guide through transgender issues, which can have mazelike complexities. Following his previous one-man shows Underground TRANSit and Debutante Balls, Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps promises to be another funny, revealing portrayal of one of Atlanta’s most interesting personalities. The performance also comes in advance of Schofield’s new book, Two Truths and a Lie, due to be published this winter.