TODAY'S CHIC (and tiresome) emphasis on irony has made it possible to "admit" one's secret love for traditionally frowned-upon cultural items: hair bands, televised sports, strip clubs, Eminem, farts. Indeed, this kitschy-dimwit aesthetic is so pervasive that, as I write this, pollsters tell us we're about to send a frat boy to the White House over the more qualified egghead chess club captain. Evidently, we'd rather have a beer with W.

Unfortunately, the benevolence of irony, kitsch, and low intelligence has yet to beknight my guilty pleasure: rock musicals. Ah, the glorious triumvirate of Tommy, Hair, and Jesus Christ Superstar! Hell, while most of my junior-high colleagues were distracted by AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix, I was busy--under the influence of JCS (side three, of course)--hiding in my room, writing the lyrics to my own musical: The Sloven, 1980's lost masterpiece.

What the much-maligned rock musical has going against it is the combination of two taboos: hippie culture and theater culture. The only thing that dares to mine the same dreaded territory is the Renaissance Fair. Well, I've got news for you: The rock musical has been saved. Made cool. And it isn't irony or stupidity that has come to the rescue. It's glitter rock.

Glitter rock is a genre of music that's best described visually. Forget about melodies, pitches, and rhythms. Picture this: 1973 David Bowie wearing silver Martian bracelets and golden boots, done up in Japanese face paint, gently strumming an acoustic guitar. The dichotomy of sci-fi grotesque (David Bowie's space alien shtick) matched up with the folksy purity of a campfire guitar has always struck me as a distillation of the defective beauty of teenagers. In one fell swoop, you've got cryptic visions of an unknown future coupled with here-and-now innocence. And that's why glitter rock is the finest of all rock music styles. Hot tramp, I love you so! (Note: Despite its glitter trappings, 1975's rock musical icon, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, is too silly to qualify as legitimate glitter rock.)

The crowning moment of this genre, it turns out, is not found on any early '70s Bowie record, or T. Rex record, or on records by their Greta Garbo, space-age contemporaries, like Roxy Music. No, this glitter world's masterpiece is found on the soundtrack to 1998's cross-dressing, off-Broadway rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It's the secret little gem that closes the show: "Midnight Radio." I won't quote it at length, but a quick dose of the lyrics ought to give you an idea of its magnificence: "You're shining like the brightest stars, a transmission on the midnight radio, and you're spinning your new 45s, all the misfits and the losers, yeah, you know you're rock and rollers."

Hedwig played at the Jane Street Theater in Manhattan from February 1998 to April 2000. Written by New York rock-circuit musician Stephen Trask and performed by award-winning actor John Cameron Mitchell, the run earned notices in Spin like, "glammy, rock-inspired theater for people who think glammy, rock-inspired theater sucks."

Trapped in the Northwest, I have been a committed long-distance fan of Mitchell's Lita Ford meets Liberace one-man/woman show. In the spring of '99, I bought the CD (the cassette too, so I could listen in the shower), while I kept abreast of the latest gossip about the upcoming Hedwig movie. The music, a slick, noisy batch of pre-fabricated punk songs and tender torch songs, is good--although, with the exception of the vampy "Wig in a Box," nothing compares to "Midnight Radio," in which our main character, Hedwig, listens to the radio with his head inside the oven because it's the only place in his apartment where reception is good.

Now Seattle will get its chance to see Hedwig. Howell Street's dive bar/dance club/ theater, Re-bar, acting as an independent production company, secured first rights to Hedwig post-New York. Wisely, they're bringing in former local Nick Garrison to play the lead. Garrison (see interview) was Seattle's reigning prince of twisted fringe-musical theater until he left town for NYC last year to pursue TV and film. I saw a preview of Hedwig at the Re-bar about a month ago that featured Garrison and the well-rehearsed band working out the kinks in a few numbers, and my expectations are fierce.

Like other rock musicals, Hedwig's "plot" is sprawling, glamorous, melodramatic, and convoluted (although it's practically an episode of The Brady Bunch when compared to Pete Townshend's perpetually unintelligible Tommy). The storyline is loosely based on Plato's Origin of Love--which postulates that human beings are only half of what they used to be. The entire human race, you see, was originally designed like Siamese twins, joined at the back, complete with four arms, four legs, two sets of eyes, two noses, etc. There were male versions (two penises), female versions (two vaginas), and a man/ woman model (one penis/one vagina). The Gods, angry at the arrogance of the talented human race, used lightning bolts to slice us in half. They finished the job by summoning a giant windstorm to scatter the halves across the earth. The tale works as Plato's allegory to explain love: The human search for a mate is the desire to make oneself whole again. It also, obviously, explains both hetero and homosexuality. And that's where a rock-and-roll drag queen like Hedwig comes in.

Hedwig taps Plato through the story of Hansel, an East German boy who falls in love with an American GI named Luther. Luther promises to marry Hansel and take him back to the U.S. only if Hansel agrees to get a sex-change operation first. Hansel gets the operation, but it goes awry, and Hansel--renamed Hedwig--is stuck without a penis or a vagina. "I was left with a one-inch mound of flesh. Where my penis used to be. Where my vagina never was," Hedwig sings like she's Maria Callas channeling Johnny Rotten.

Hedwig, now divorced from Luther, is stuck living in a Kansas trailer park. It's here, paying the bills as a lounge singer, that Hedwig meets Tommy--Hansel's other half. Tommy and Hedwig fall in love, until the fateful night when Tommy discovers Hedwig's secret: Despite how fine she looks in a dress, she isn't exactly a girl. "Hey, what's this?" Tommy storms out, and, borrowing the musical talents he learned from Hedwig's lounge show, becomes the world-famous rock star Tommy Gnosis.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch captures Hedwig's sparsely attended lounge rant (happening within earshot of a sold-out Tommy Gnosis concert) in which Hedwig recounts his/her lamentable tale. With additional elements thrown in--like, oh, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and Jewish-German relations--the sordid story is intended to take on socio-cosmic grandeur. I won't give it that. But as the rock musical that features glitter's finest moment--without irony, without dumbing down, and with no apologies--Hedwig is the theater piece that forces you to make room in your rock collection, as opposed to the miscellaneous rack, for a brand-new CD.