Actors in drag are in fashion this season

"The word is you're looking for a drag queen," growls the voice, which is pure Beelzebub of Brooklyn, which means it is Harvey Fierstein.

He has called to share his expertise -- along with generous bouffants of good humor -- about what appears to be the next chapter in the mainstreaming of men dressed as women.

In fact, it appears everyone's looking for a drag queen these days.

Fierstein can currently be found in satin and feathers as Albin/Zaza, the St. Tropez diva in the 2010 Tony-winning revival of his 1984 Tony-winning musical, "La Cage aux Folles." Opening next Sunday is a splashy disco-musical adaptation of "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," the cross-dressing Australian road movie from 1994.

Elsewhere, Brian Bedford is making an exquisitely dry Lady Bracknell in "The Importance of Being Earnest." "Where's Charley?," Frank Loesser's musical adaptation of 1892 boy-meets-corset comedy "Charley's Aunt," is the semistaged revival at Encores! Thursday through next Sunday.

From England, Edward Hall's Propeller company brings another of its all-male modern Shakespeare productions -- "The Comedy of Errors" -- to the Brooklyn Academy of Music Wednesday through March 27. "RuPaul's Drag Race" is an entertaining reality-TV hit, a show that asks the previously unlikely question, "Who will be America's next drag star?"

Even James Franco briefly wore a Marilyn Monroe gown on the Oscar telecast.

So it feels time to ask again: What's so appealing about a man in a dress? Fierstein, whose breakthrough 1983 Tony-winning "Torch Song Trilogy" made America love a drag queen in bunny slippers, believes the attraction is primal and historic.

"Drag goes back to the beginning of time," he says, chuckling about our culture's need to explain the phenomenon every decade or so, as if it were new and exotic. "Like it or not, there is something mysterious and fascinating about being the opposite. When you cross-dress, you are freed in a way that is forbidden but part of real life. Gay or straight -- and you know that 90 percent of transvestites are heterosexuals -- this goes back to us as animals and to ancient religions."

Fierstein is justly celebrated for putting a comic spin on serious subjects. Arnold Beckhoff, his alter-ego character in "Torch Song," famously declared: "There are easier things than being a drag queen, but I ain't got no choice. I can't walk in flats."

Yet he is a serious drag historian. "Two of the biggest Ziegfeld stars were Bert Savoy and Jay Brennan, who created man-woman comedy sketches. Savoy first put Milton Berle in a dress when he was 15 years old."

Funny he should mention Uncle Miltie, whose appearances on '50s TV imprinted me early with an aversion to the silly-girl, hairy-leg, costume-party kind of straight-guy drag. I admire the artistry in creative drag. But Robin Williams in huge stuffed breasts in "Mrs. Doubtfire"? Not funny to me. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis wobbling in high heels in "Some Like It Hot"? Honestly, I never got it.

I suspect I'd be a better sport about the masquerade if the kick went both ways, or if women got male roles half as often as the other way around. Perhaps then, men taking itty-bitty steps and holding coffee cups with dainty fingers wouldn't make me think so often of female minstrel shows.

But women in trousers -- think Madonna with a cigar and a monocle -- are hardly the emotional equivalent of men in pantyhose.

So I took the inequity question to Charles Busch, female impersonator extraordinaire, upon whose face you can currently see flicker an infinite number of exquisitely overwrought females in "The Divine Sister" at the SoHo Playhouse (15 Vandam St.).

Like Fierstein, he doesn't see why I think women in drag lack subversive excitement. Both men mention, uh, how dangerous Marlene Dietrich was in pants in the '30s. A specialist for 30 years, however, he gets at least as annoyed as I do when guys think they can just put on a wig and be a woman.

Busch's work is often wonderfully silly, but elegant and subtle. He says he appreciates the Broadway glamour spectacles with their "big heart and a very comforting notion of family," but his women lean toward "constraint and self-protection. I'm so influenced by the women in my family." He likes to play characters who are "elegant ladies -- but in the past, they had been dames."

He has nothing but admiration for Franco, who, despite "coming out sort of like a lumberjack" in Oscar drag, is a "fascinating contemporary figure, spectacularly interesting and so free playing with androgyny." He delights in RuPaul's "transgressive yet all-embracing sweetness," observing, "We used to get one effeminate homosexual on a TV show. Now we get 12 effeminate homosexuals and the audience has to be specific about which ones they like."

At the other extreme, we have Will Swenson, a newbie in the world of high heels and female fabulousness. The actor, an irresistible Berger in the recent revival of "Hair," says he has been discovering "this incredible new persona" for "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert."

Swenson plays a drag performer with a kid and a wife, the only member of the Australian trio crossing the Outback who is not an out homosexual. In London when he got hired for the show, Swenson went out on the town in full drag--leather bustier, fishnets, miniskirt. I can't imagine, but he says, "The second I put on the outfit, it felt really empowering." The shaving, of course, is a drag.