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"Our fag rhymes are tight!” raps T-Bag, a star of Bash’d. Tight enough, anyway. The verses he drops with his partner Feminem might not keep Nas up nights, but their gay rap opera makes a preposterous idea work so well you can only applaud the result. Chris Craddock and Nathan Cuckow tell a “Romeo and Romeo” story of two men falling in love, getting married (they’re Canadian, you understand), and grappling with a bigoted attack, rapping almost the entire time. It’s overheated now and then, and makes an unfortunate detour through the supernatural, but it turns out to be more amusing than anything else in musical theater’s avant-garde.

In fact, though it’s intriguing to watch rap and the musical inch ever-closer, the real draw of Bash’d is anthropological: watching gay culture and hip-hop culture collide. Craddock and Cuckow declare up front that they’re reclaiming “faggot,” as two generations of rappers before them have reclaimed various racial slurs. They’re also carrying on Missy Elliott and Lil’ Kim’s mission of extending the rapping-inappropriately-about-sex franchise to a group other than straight men. The way T-Bag and Feminem see it, homosexuals are entitled to use the same obscene language as everybody else. “As Nasty As They Wanna Be,” they might have called the show, if somebody hadn’t gotten there first. — Jeremy McCarter