Flight of fancy Airborne Pigs at the Lyric BY CAROLYN CLAY
	When Pigs Fly Conceived by Howard Crabtree and Mark Waldrop. Sketches and lyrics by Waldrop. Costumes by Crabtree. Music by Dick Gallagher. Musical staging and additional choreography by Ilyse Robbins, based on original staging and choreography by Rob Ruggiero. Musical direction by Steven Bergman. Set by Janie E. Howland. Costume reproduction by Tina Marie Green-Heinze. Lighting by Scott Pinkney. With Dan Bolton, Peter A. Carey, Neil A. Casey, Brian Robinson, and Britton White. At the Lyric Stage Company of Boston through October 18.

If A Queer Eye for the Straight Guy were to visit Florenz Ziegfeld, the result might be something like Howard Crabtree’s When Pigs Fly. A celebration of so-called gay sensibility and the late Crabtree’s whimsical genius with a needle, the 1996 musical revue, which the Lyric Stage Company of Boston first presented in 1999, turned out to be the most requested rerun in its history. So in celebration of its 30th anniversary, the company has brought it back, with four of its five original cast members, the replication of Rob Ruggiero’s direction and choreography, and a cornucopia of costumes whose ingredients include not just the expected feathers and sequins (not to mention some headdresses the size of Mount Monadnock) but baby-bottle nipples, rubber duckies, and plungers. It’s as if Crabtree had strolled through the notions department of his Woolworth’s and had a vision.

Actually, the vision he — or his alter ego in the show — keeps having is one of a nasty high-school guidance counselor redolent of The Wizard of Oz: she laughs like Margaret Hamilton, and her hairdo’s a veritable twister. Taunting and later haunting the theater-struck youth (who first appears, dressed as "Dream Curly" from Oklahoma!, in chaps fringed with yellow boa feathers), she suggests a career in watch repair or chicken farming, finally allowing that his show-biz dreams might indeed come true "when pigs fly!" The show, a follow-up to the similarly low-budget extravaganza Whoop-Dee-Doo!, is Crabtree’s attempt to prove the old witch wrong — though in the end he joins as much as beats her.

One is tempted to say that there’s nothing important about When Pigs Fly; it’s just an hour and 50 minutes of flamboyant fun. But there actually is a liberal political agenda, and it’s especially apparent in performer Peter A. Carey’s series of leering love songs to icons of the right and in the show’s Sousa-esque first-act finale, a showboating demand for tolerance done up in Music Man regalia in which the cast points out what a dull place America would be if it were hopelessly heterosexual. In a sort of parade-of-states lyric, the song, with the plain-spoken title "A Patriotic Finale," points out that you can’t take the "color" out of Colorado or the "homa" out of Oklahoma or have New York without Queens. As for Carey’s dinner-jacketed paeans to Dick Cheney, Pat Robertson, and Charlton Heston (updated since 1999, when he torched for Newt), the best is the valentine to Cheney, in which the scarf-fluttering performer, his eyes soulfully crossed in lust, promises to join the VP at his "undisclosed location/And do for you what you’re doing to the nation." This is not a show for Betsy Ross, even if she would appreciate the costumes.

One reason When Pigs Fly is irresistible is that the cast members, holdovers from 1999 abetted by the vampily butch Brian Robinson, all are. They’re fine singers, and that adds to the heft of such piffle as a quartet for man-size playing cards and the 18th-century-set anthem to painfully conjured fashion "Wear Your Vanity with Pride," the punch line of which is a literal evocation of its title. And the five camp it up in very different, mostly endearing ways. Dan Bolton, a sort of diminutive Conan O’Brien often seen dangling the tools of the costumer’s trade, stands in ingenuously for Crabtree. Neil A. Casey, whose character is continually being thwarted in such bungled guises as mermaid-with-billowing-seaweed-hair-and-upturned-nipples and the title pork that doesn’t fly, provides the prima donna fume. And tennis-anyone-looking Britton White works his sincere way through the ostensibly straighter solos, including one in which, alone in a locker-room shower, his character wonders why the other guys say he’s "not all man" — before striding out of the stall and, in a visual gag as ancient as vaudeville, making the answer obvious.

Will you miss one of the more profound offerings of the inheritors of Thespis if you fail to see Crabtree’s pigs launched? Of course not. And, truth to tell, the Carey character’s melancholy allegation that in politically unseasonable times "laughing matters" seems shallower post–September 11. But the best of co-conceiver Mark Waldrop’s lines and sketches are belly-laughers. Dick Gallagher’s variously genre-derivative songs are clever and jaunty. And the late Crabtree understood that, with imagination, you can stack a spectacular show on a shoestring.