Anyone running a theater is always looking for their next big hit. In March of 1997 Bob Schrock was running the Celebration Theater in Los Angeles, a popular theater in the gay and lesbian community, and he decided to use a simple formula to come up with an idea for a new hit show.

“I decided what does my audience like,” Schrock said. “They are gay men, and gay men, well, they like nudity. What else do they like? They like musicals. I thought, wait, let’s put them together.”

Thus was born the idea for the show Naked Boys Singing, but Schrock didn’t want this to be just another excuse to put men on display, he wanted to make sure that it was first and foremost an entertaining show… that just happened to have an entirely nude cast.

So he put the word out to all of the songwriters he knew that he was looking for songs that would fit into the show, and in a short time he had 50 songs submitted. Schrock says that he chose the ones that most closely fit with what he wanted to say about Naked Boys Singing and in 1998 the show opened in Los Angeles.

“From the very beginning in Los Angeles, when we first opened, we were a huge hit and got valentines in all of the papers,” Schrock said of the early reviews. “A drive time radio show here called Mark and Brian picked up on the review of it in the paper and started goofing on it and our smart publicist called them up and said ‘hey, why don’t you have us on’ and we did 40 minutes on a drive time radio show and we hit every secretary and assistant that was driving in to work that day. The box office had over 800 calls that day and it was all women.”

The show traveled from Los Angeles to New York in July of 1999 and has been playing off Broadway ever since. In total, there have been 20 productions of the show, staged all over the world. Now it is taking to the road, and San Diego’s Spreckels Theater will host the debut of the touring show.

While the idea of eight men on stage naked and singing might cause conservatives to raise an eyebrow or two, Schrock emphasized that the show is not sexual; it is a celebration of nudity and the human body.

“That’s the whole point of the show,” Schrock said. “I appeared in a naked show in 1970 and so I really got early on in my career that nudity is not something to be ashamed of. So when I was putting the show together I wanted material that really celebrated it and let us not be ashamed of our bodies at all and explore that there is a lot more to nudity than sex.”

The show opens with a number called gratuitous nudity. It’s a standard opening number that gets right to the point when the entire cast gets rid of their clothes.

“I think that people expect it to be sleazy, not well done, amateur and material that’s not as good as it is,” Schrock said about the show’s content. “What I really try to emphasize to people is if you like a musical comedy you are going to like this show. If you’re the least bit squeamish about the nudity, you won’t be after two minutes.”

Cast member Craig Russell Lewis added about the opening number, “I think it lets the audience know exactly what they are in for. There is nothing quite like the first feeling of the audience reacting to when we expose ourselves.”

Lewis has been performing with the Chicago company of the show for a year now and came in as a replacement for one of the cast members who was leaving.

“My rehearsal time was very short, so the first time I went out on stage I wasn’t concerned about the nudity,” Lewis said. “I was more concerned about knowing the choreography.… I could have cared less [about the nudity]. I could have been wearing a muumuu at that point, as long as I would have known the damn choreography; that’s completely what I was concentrating on.”

Naked Boys Singing is not the first show that Lewis has done where he has appears nude on stage, but the other show never made it beyond the Chicago theater scene.

“The nudity was trying to be written in as natural and it kind of felt less natural,” Lewis said, comparing the shows. “It actually felt less natural trying to do a show where the nudity was just not as flagrant or celebrational. It’s actually much, much easier to get up on stage and swing your dick to choreography than it is to get up and undress in an artistic way.”

The show itself runs the range of emotions from comedy numbers — including one about a naked maid — to ballads, which even address the topic of a lover who has lost his partner to AIDS. San Diego native Rayme Sciaroni even wrote a romantic ballad called “Window to Window” for the production.

“I don’t think it’s sexual show at all,” Lewis said, explaining that the show is being marketed to both the GLBT audience and the mainstream public through radio and television advertisements. “It’s a funny show, and I think when it comes to dealing with issues with any kind of intimacy, its not necessarily sexual. I think it’s about finding a partner or a lover. It’s about all of the things — whether you are gay or straight — that you try to find in your life.”

Naked Boys Singing is a show about celebrating nudity through song and dance, with a five year run off Broadway under its belt and a lineup of 16 songs to make audiences laugh and cry. In the end, beyond all of the entertainment is the message that nudity isn’t something to be afraid of or ashamed of.

“People do leave the show always saying it’s not what they expected,” Schrock said. “I get people all the time saying, ‘Wow, you made me think about my own body and my own images and my own problems,’ so it’s kind of interesting that it is fun entertainment but it does have a point.”

He added that audiences should just come with an open mind. “Leave the hang-ups at home, come and have a good time. It’s a comedy without pants.”