‘Oh! Calcutta!’ to Unveil at Celebrity Theatre on ‘Farewell Tour’ : Musical: A bus-and-truck version of the naughty revue will pause for two performances Sunday in Anaheim as it tours America.

Let the record show that 20 years, eight months, three weeks and a day after “Oh! Calcutta!” first opened off-Broadway, a bus-and-truck version will bow here Sunday for two performances at the Celebrity Theatre in what is being billed as “a farewell tour.”

Let the record also show that this naughty musical revue is coming to bid adieu by way of one-nighters in Orono, Me.; Stamford, Conn.; Middletown, N.Y.; Burlington, Vt.; Greensboro, N.C.; Pensacola, Fla.; El Paso, and other similarly theater-starved towns.

By now the legend of “Oh! Calcutta!” has grown ripe with age. On a lark, British drama critic Kenneth Tynan invited a handful of friends--including such cultural luminaries as Jules Feiffer and the two Sams (Beckett and Shepard) along with John Lennon--to dash off a dozen or so sketches about “the pursuit of happiness through sex.”

The result--which opened June 17, 1969, and seemed an outgrowth of changing sexual mores--was a trendy mishmash of dirty jokes, erotic ballet, soft rock, disco lighting and, above all, fleeting moments of frontal nudity. Naturally the show became a megahit roundly panned by the critics. Some even joked that the sketches were individually uncredited in the program because the writing was so bad the famous authors didn’t want the credit.

In its first yearlong run on Broadway ending in 1972 and in a revival there from 1976 to 1989, “Oh! Calcutta!” gave a total of 5,959 performances--thus becoming the second longest-running show in Broadway history (topped only by “A Chorus Line”). Not to get too sentimental, Tynan’s mischievous experiment is reported to have grossed about $350 million.

This time out, with a non-Equity cast assembled in New York for the 90-city tour, the big stop will be a week in Detroit. That will come in March, with the tour scheduled to end in May. If, however, box office receipts in the hinterlands are good enough, an “Oh! Calcutta!” spokesman said producers are considering a goodby wave to Europe, where previous versions have toured.

“Most of the material is the same as before,” said Cheryl Hartley, who spent 11 years in the Broadway revival and is staging the musical numbers for this production. “They built a new set. They have the costumes we used. There are a lot of costumes.”

Although the show “has a reputation for nudity,” she said from Boca Raton, Fla., “the nudity is not that big a deal. The language is really much more shocking. It’s a lot of little dirty jokes.

“On Broadway we had so many foreign tourists seeing the show, they didn’t get the jokes because they didn’t understand English. On this tour the people are laughing.”

During a 1979 tour of “Oh! Calcutta!” lawyers for the show had to go to court in 24 of 119 U.S. cities to make sure performances could begin. In three other cities, police arrested the cast for obscenity after the curtain went up.

Allen Stewart, a spokesman for producer Barry Singer, said from his New Jersey office that this tour has not encountered any problems with would-be censors. A newspaper in Oklahoma City declined to run an advertisement, he said, and a radio station in Stamford yanked a commercial after callers complained.

“It’s the people who haven’t seen the show that rant and rave,” Stewart said. “They think it’s the worst thing to come to their town. But if they’ve seen it, it’s not that bad.”

Just so you know: The musical revue has nothing to do with India or anything remotely Asiatic. The title is a pun on a slangy French phrase expressing admiration for the female sexual organ.

“Oh! Calcutta!” will be staged Sunday at 3:30 and 7:30 p.m. at the Celebrity Theatre, 201 E. Broadway, Anaheim. Tickets: $17 (matinee), $19 (evening). Box office: (714) 999-9536.