Axl, the Musical?

“I want to be in a metal band / Please let me sing for you. . . .”

With this simple plea, singer-songwriter Andy Prieboy and a handful of players on the tiny stage at the Largo nightclub invite their audience into an unflinching rock ‘n’ roll burlesque, a revealing portrait of the music business in all its despicable, mercurial glory.

“White Trash Wins Lotto” is a Broadway-style musical satire that twists the rags-to-riches saga of superstar metal band Guns N’ Roses. It’s brutal but so dead-on hilarious that record biz types are filling the Fairfax district club to capacity for Prieboy’s monthly performances. (The August staging is scheduled for next Saturday.)

The clamor is a welcome sound to the veteran musician, who is probably best known for replacing singer Stan Ridgway in the ‘80s L.A. band Wall of Voodoo. He also made a mark with his poignant 1990 ballad “Tomorrow Wendy,” which was also recorded by Concrete Blonde.

Last December, Prieboy signed a publishing deal for his musical, allowing him to keep working on the show while he decides what form it will ultimately take. He’s already had offers from stage, screen and cable TV. Not bad for a still-developing project that started out as a joke.

During an interview at his Silver Lake home studio, Prieboy described its inspiration: a neighboring couple who wrote “bad Broadway musicals.”

While listening to them ply their craft one night about two years ago, Prieboy said, he idly wondered “how my neighbors, having no rock ‘n’ roll background, would have interpreted the Axl Rose story. It had all the characteristics of a great Broadway musical: Young boy comes from nowhere with a trunk full of dreams, conquers the world and almost loses his soul.”

He immediately wrote some lines that he said were “so awful, I was laughing.” He soon worked a few songs into his regular Largo performances. Audiences’ reactions were so positive that in recent months Prieboy’s shows have featured the musical exclusively.

“I thought it was incredibly innovative and very funny,” said Danny Strick, president of BMG Songs, the U.S. music publishing company that will help Prieboy get the show produced.

Strick views “White Trash” as “a classic musical, not a rock musical per se,” even though the story involves a rock band. “He deals with the music business in an allegorical way,” Strick noted, with sharp observations about the consequences of success.

The story unfolds through 14 numbers that satirize Broadway musical conventions while skewering a range of music biz star-making shenanigans. Seated at his keyboard, Prieboy briefly narrates each bit to “dress the stage,” then turns the illusion over to his cast. Actor-singer Estefan Bravo makes an appropriately starry-eyed lead character, and musician-dancer Rita D’Albert and opera diva Crissy Guerrero deftly handle roles ranging from heavy-metal stripper chicks to rock ‘n’ roll muses. Later in the show, comedians Blaine Capatch, Greg Behrendt and Paul F. Tompkins lustily portray an array of sleazy power players.

Prieboy’s inside view gives his extravagant characters and barbed production numbers a jolt of extra-bitter truth, but you don’t need to know the music business to understand the jokes. “You just need to know human nature,” he said. And as he savages the rock industry, the ways he manipulates the Broadway formula underscore his contempt for the Great White Way’s treatment of rock ‘n’ roll.

“Rock ‘n’ roll thrives on a sense of danger and the unexpected,” he said. “When you adapt it to the Broadway stage and you have 80 neurotic hoofers trying to hit their marks, you lose that illusion, you lose that danger, and it just becomes shtick.”

At the same time, characters once considered dangerous and unpredictable--guys like, say, Axl Rose--eventually become almost endearing, as their bad reputations fade with the times and the rise of, as Prieboy put it, “new terrorist emperors,” like Marilyn Manson.

“The last place Axl-based characters really belong is on a Broadway stage,” he said, “but eventually they will [get there]. They’ll put him on the stage and make us [empathize with] him.”

That probably isn’t the destiny of Prieboy’s Axl-based character, but who knows how the story will turn out? The songwriter demurred: “It’s still a work in progress.”

Could that progress become stalled by legal issues surrounding his adaptation of the band’s story? Prieboy was mum about what reactions, if any, Rose and the other Guns have had. Through a Geffen Records spokeswoman, the band declined to comment.

But dissenting voices occasionally pipe up. “You know the scene where the muses descend behind Izzy at Ben Frank’s and urge him on in his pursuit of a cool stage name?” Prieboy asked, laughing. “Somebody came up to me after a show and said, ‘Hey, I know Izzy. That’s not how he got his name.’ ”

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Andy Prieboy performs next Saturday at Largo, 432 N. Fairfax Ave., 10:30 p.m. $10. (323) 852-1073.