Neil Patrick Harris is adding another credit to his resume: Broadway recording artist. The Tony-nominated actor and former How I Met Your Mother star will be featured on the original cast album for the Broadway revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, in which Harris plays the title character, an East German transgender lamenting her botched sex change.
Atlantic Records will release the recording on July 1 to all digital outlets, with composer Stephen Trask, the production’s Tony-nominated sound designer and multiplatinum record producer Tim O’Heir and music director Justin Craigproducing. Lena Hall, who is Tony-nominated for playing Hedwig’s husband Yitzhak, will also be featured on this recording. Craig, Matt Duncan, Tim Mislock and Peter Yanowitz, who comprise the production’s onstage band Tits of Clay, will also appear on the album. The show’s producer David Binder and Elie Landau will executive produce. Atlantic also released the show’s original Off-Broadway cast recording in 1999, which featured John Cameron Mitchell, the show’s book writer and original title star, and the soundtrack for the 2001 film, also featuring Mitchell and Miriam Shor, who played Yitzhak.
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“Anyone who has spent more than five minutes with me in the last three months knows how excited I am by the new versions of these songs,” Trask says in a statement, calling Tits of Clay an “amazing f—ing band” and adding that these recordings are the culmination of collaborating with Craig and O’Heir for years on other projects as well as Hedwig and reworking these songs for Broadway. “If any band wants to learn any of these songs, these are the versions they should study.”
The record doesn’t mark Harris’ first time recording, however. When he guest-starred on Glee, for which he won an Emmy Award, he recorded a cover of Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” with Matthew Morrison, and he also appeared on the cast recording for the 2004 revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. He also was a replacement Emcee in the revival of Cabaret on Broadway in 2003.
In addition to producing albums with Trask, O’Heir has also worked with the All-American Rejects, the Flaming Lips and Say Anything, among many other artists.
Hedwig opened at the Belasco Theatre on April 22 and is nominated for eight Tony awards, including best revival and best director for Michael Mayer. The show originally premiered at the Westbeth Theater in 1997 and transferred to the Jane Street Theater in 1998, both also produced by Binder.
The album will be available at physical retailers starting July 15. Trask expressed his enthusiasm for the show’s new takes on his songs, “The talents of Neil and Lena and this amazing f—ing band have made these the best version of the score ever. After years of working with Justin Craig and a decade-and-a-half recording with Tim O’Heir, producing these recordings as a team with them has been everything I could have hoped. I think we truly captured the brilliance of these great performers. If any band wants to learn any of these songs, these are the versions they should study.”
The show’s other nominations include Best Scenic Design (Julian Crouch), Best Costumes (Arianne Phillips), Best Lighting (Kevin Adams), and Best Sound Design (O’Heir). In addition, the production has been honored with Best Musical Revival by the Drama League and Outer Critics Circle Awards and has been nominated in the same category by the Drama Desk Awards.
- This article originally appeared in THR.com.