When audience members arrive at a show decked like the star, it’s a surefire sign of cult status. Although there were plenty of khaki-clad kids at Zany Hijinx’ production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the Institute of Contemporary Art, opening night last Friday was an occasion for fans to brandish boas, Farrah Fawcett–esque coiffures, and glittery make-up while listening to how "a slip of a girly boy from East Berlin became an internationally ignored song stylist."

In the drag tradition of The Rocky Horror Show, this glam-rock musical melodrama is the brainchild of John Cameron Mitchell, who starred in the 1998 Off Broadway premiere and the 2001 film version (Boston’s previous production played at the Stuart Street Theatre in 1999, with Kevin Cahoon). In a series of monologues and songs, Hedwig Schmidt (Gene Dante) chronicles her quasi-metamorphosis. Born Hansel in a city divided like himself, he’s raised on the Communist side of the Wall; when he catches the eye of an American GI, he undergoes a sex change for a marriage license (read: visa). The procedure is botched and the semi-she ends up abandoned in a Kansas trailer park with a bleak musical career and an angry inch, her pet name for her anatomical anomaly. Nonetheless, driven by a spiritual pursuit rooted in Gnostic mythology, which she tenderly explains in the ballad "Origins of Love," she will find her other half. When she meets church-band guitarist Tommy Speck, she feeds him a heavy diet of Iggy and Bowie, christens him "Gnosis," and falls in love. But Tommy discovers her deficiency and jets, claiming songs they wrote together as his own as he rockets to stadium-packing fame.

But with Dante competently doubling as Hedwig and Tommy, the dramatic arc is secondary to what amounts to a cabaret-style concert, complete with flirtatious forays into the audience. Loaded with raunchy one-liners and references to pop stars and trends yanked from the depths of cultural detritus, the monologues ramble between performances of Stephen Trask’s impressive array of songs, which swing from guitar-driven punk angst to pop sap to jaunty rockabilly. Backed by a five-piece outfit of misfit punk-rockers who provide sprawling orchestrations, and a fawning but surly second husband, Yitzhak (Lisa Boucher channeling Axl Rose), Dante struts disco-queen-style, wallows in bleary-eyed pathos, and erupts in a firestorm of hardcore thrashing to air Hedwig’s identity-crisis-fueled anguish.

What the theater lacks in acoustics (the lyrics sometimes got lost in the volume), it makes up for in ambiance: walls are festooned with rock posters and tabloid-magazine covers. And if Hedwig’s sad sensitivity doesn’t get to you, maybe you’ll be entertained by the dangling Barbie Dolls flashing plastic smiles from lewd positions.