THEATER

“The Toxic Avenger,” that gloriously ripe camp-horror film from 1984, never really disappeared, but who would have expected it to reach the stage as an off-Broadway musical 25 years after it first made a hazmat splash?

After several months at New Jersey’s George Street Playhouse in the fall, the kitschy “Toxic Avenger: The Musical” gets its opening night in Manhattan on Monday at New York’s New World Stages.

“I think the people in the show give it some validity,” says star Nick Cordero, who plays the Avenger and his nerdy alter ego, Melvin Ferd. “With the Broadway climate nowadays, there is no shortage of theaters wanting shows. It wasn’t as hard to find a theater as it was finding the right one.”

Tony-winning director John Rando (“Urinetown”) leads the show’s creative team, which includes Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan, who cowrote the loopy rock opera with songwriter Joe DiPietro.

Conceived in spring 2008, the “Avenger” musical is set in aromatic (and fictitious) Tromaville, N.J., which holds the dubious honor of being the world’s most polluted city. “It’s poking fun at New Jersey in a good way,” Bryan says. “We [Bon Jovi] are from there, and we are not mocking ourselves out. . . . Everywhere on Earth since ‘The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson,’ it’s always the Jersey joke.”

Just as Hollywood mines old TV shows for high-concept ideas and name recognition, stage productions are looking to fanboy faves as unexpected source material, with high-profile ventures such as “The Fly” at Los Angeles Opera and a big-budget “Spider-Man” show planned. So it’s no surprise that “Avenger” has the familiar beats of the old film and also some 21st century messages stirred in with the vintage sludge.

In the old film, 98-pound weakling Ferd gets a nasty chemical bath in an accidental fall that can be blamed on cruel bullies; in the musical, he is thrown into a vat of goo after challenging the local mayor on environmental regulations. “It’s timely,” Cordero says. “It’s got an environmental spin.”

But wait: Is this the same Toxic Avenger who, in the first film, splattered a villain’s head under an exercise machine and cleaned it up with a mop?

“There is no pain involved, especially when I emerge as the Toxic Avenger,” Cordero says. “It’s for comedy and the shock factor. People don’t see it coming. I’m clutching [someone’s] fist as he’s about to hit me, and then I rip his arm off. I rip out intestines. I decapitate somebody at one point and dunk his head in his barrel like I was Earvin Johnson. The aim of the show is we want to get people a little scared. We want them to go, ‘Whoa.’ ”

And for you Jersey music fans, not only does the show take a few gentle shots at favorite son Bruce Springsteen, but Bryan also says his bandmates Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora plan to attend Monday’s bow.

-- Nicholas White