When Bill Russell, the lyricist and co-book writer of Lucky Duck (now startling audiences at The Old Globe) was 5, he was “blessed” by a professional actor playing Jesus in the famed Black Hills Passion Play. Obviously, his course was either the church or show biz.

Lucky for us little Bill – who always knew something about him was “different” – chose the latter. He was born in Deadwood, South Dakota – where desperado cowboy Wild Bill died – and grew up in Spearfish, just across the border from Wyoming.

“I was in the pageant from the time I was 5,” he said in a recent interview. “They have a core cast of about 20 professional actors and supplement that with 200 townspeople in mob scenes and stuff.”

So it was the middle of nowhere. But the Passion Play had a definite life backstage and the presence of professional actors gave the Russell kid a glimmer of realms beyond them thar hills. Besides bringing the local cult hit Lucky Duck to the stage in San Diego, Russell is the musical brain behind a somewhat eccentric repertoire that includes the Broadway and off-Broadway musicals Texas Chainsaw Musical (1985), the popular AIDS piece Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens (1989), Pageant (1991), Side Show (1997) and the latest local sensation Lucky Duck.

Brilliantly performed by a company of nine decked out in costume designer Gregg Barnes’ (Pageant) plumage and fur, the reworked musical receives standing ovations from ecstatic Globe audiences. Lucky Duck began as Everything’s Ducky for Russell and Dreamgirls composer and co-collaborator Henry Krieger. They worked on it for nearly 10 years, adding to the team co-book writer Jeffrey Hatcher (Compleat Female Stage Beauty) and Tony Award-winning director John Rando (Urinetown) – to become the more thoroughly evolved Lucky Duck.

The result is an extremely bawdy look at the post-apocalyptic barnyard, where feathered beings rule and former predators are vegans. The title character, Serena Mallard, becomes a mega-star swan, upsetting animal equilibrium when her singing causes citizens to revert to their innate former behaviors.

“I hope it will have continued life,” said Russell after the July 16 opening. “A lot of producers are coming in from New York to look at it, so we’ll see what happens. It’s certainly a crowd-pleaser.”

”I like to think of us as the thorn in Disney’s side,” says director Rando. “As much as I admire The Lion King – and [Director] Julie Taymor’s work is astounding in it – I like to think that we’re also Julie Taymor’s worst nightmare.”

Of the Russell-Krieger team, Rando says: “I have an amazing company and of course Bill Russell and Henry Krieger, who are musical theater institutions in themselves, are wonderfully creative people. They really know how to work on musicals – so willing to bend, to come up with new songs, new ideas. They’re first rate collaborators.”

When he was in second grade, Russell wrote and directed his first show, a version of Cinderella starring his friends. He was so persuasive, even then, that he got every teacher in the school to let all the kids out of class so they could see the show.

Russell was active in high school theatre. He got the heck out of Spearfish right after graduation and headed for Sioux City, where he attended Morningside College. In the summer he worked at a New Jersey resort about 60 miles out of Manhattan.

“They specifically hired college theater majors to wait tables and be chambermaids so we could put on shows for their clients,” Russell says. “We had one day off every two weeks and I would go to New York City to see a show and whatever. I’d known since my first trip there at age 16 that New York was the place for me.”

At the resort Bill met his lifelong collaborator, Janet Hood, a music major at Oberlin.

“Janet was a classical pianist, but she had this black woman inside her somewhere that was screaming to get out. She could play rock and jazz, improvise and play by ear. It was amazing.”

Russell had an idea for a musical based on the Icarus legend, and even though neither had ever written a song, they wrote a musical, Sun, Son entirely by mail. Produced at the University of Kansas where Russell was by then a student, it won the BMI Inter-Varsity Show Competition for new musicals.

Hood and Linda Langford, whom she’d met at Oberlin, formed a duo known as Jade and Sarsaparilla.

“They were having a relationship, so we started writing into that, which at the time was pretty edgy, even in Boston,” says Russell. He became their lyricist, manager and promoter and for several years they toured New England, making local and national television appearances.

“Then I had an idea for a show and through the music business met a guy who wanted to be a producer,” says Russell. “My show, Fourtune [sic], ran seven months off-Broadway. The producer said, ‘If you want to write shows you’ve got to live in New York because this is where everybody is,’ and it’s true. I love New York and can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

Russell and his partner, Bruce Bossard, celebrated their 25th anniversary with the Lucky Duck company, sharing champagne and cake in the Green Room following a preview performance. Then everyone trouped into the theater, and from the pit Krieger performed a song he’d written especially for the occasion.

Russell and Krieger may take another go at their musical Kept, a Studio 54-set disco beat version of Camille originally produced at Theatre Works in Palo Alto. Russell and Krieger also co-wrote “Take the Flame” – the official anthem of the Gay Games – and “Santa’s Gonna Rock and Roll” – the opening number of the Radio City Music Hall Christmas show since 1994.

Russell is writing his first novel, Narcissus, which concerns a super-successful rock star who’s really into himself. Russell agrees that the book sounds like a film, “with like, Johnny Depp doing love scenes with himself. What actor could resist?”