Joey Arias and Thierry Mugler's design collaboration

On the shoe box-sized stage of the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, steps away from the site of last weekend's Museum of Contemporary Art gala where Miuccia Prada mixed it up with Frank Gehry and Lady Gaga to create a five-minute performance art piece, a smaller scale but bigger impact melding of fashion, high camp and high art opened Wednesday. It stars a 60-year-old drag queen in a Thierry Mugler corset, whose flirting with a marionette jazz band is the tamest of the evening's person-on-puppet encounters.

That would be Joey Arias, the vocalist and gay New York night-life hero who has elevated drag to an art form with his Billie Holiday-inspired cabaret style. His extravaganza "Arias With a Twist" is a collaboration with Basil Twist, a third-generation puppeteer and the only American to have graduated from the renowned École Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette in France. For this production, many of the puppets Twist uses are antiques that belonged to his grandfather -- such treasures that they fly first class, he said.

Onstage, Arias is the lone visible human devouring a visual feast of otherworldly aliens, devils on strings and voracious (and sexually suggestive) vegetation in what ends up being one heck of a trip.

The show's premiere attracted the alterno-chic set, including actresses Rosanna Arquette and Lisa Edelstein, designers Michael Schmidt, Katy Rodriguez and Raven Kauffman, cross-dressing model Constance and Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn.

"I first met Joey in 1989 at the club Save the Robots," said Bryan Rabin, an event producer, who wore his Stephen Sprouse for Louis Vuitton graffiti-print high-top sneakers as a 1980s homage. "He was rock 'n' roll, he was New York City. He was the world I wanted to be in. My parents didn't have friends like that."

After a brief stint in improv with the Groundlings in L.A., Arias moved in the 1970s to New York City, where he worked at the Fiorucci clothing store and hung out with underground icon Klaus Nomi. He began his performance career in nightclubs, went on to make music albums, appear onstage ("Christmas With the Crawfords") and in films ("To Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar" and "Wigstock: The Movie").