You say typecasting, I say playing to an actor’s strengths. And the new comedy “Shows for Days” plays to Patti LuPone’s strengths to the power ofღ a gazillion.
The role of Irene, flamboyant artistic director of an amateur regional theater gro🎶up, is catnip to LuPone. Headstrong, temperamental, quick-witted, manipulative, supportive, passionate — Irene is the soul of her company and a gift to the star who brings her to vivid, hilarious life.
Or rather, brings her back to life: Playwright Douglas Carter Beane drew on his experience as a 🅷teenager enthralled by a charismatic troupe director in Reading, Pa.
The charming M༒ichael Urie (“Buyer & Cellar,” TV’s “Ugly Betty”) plays Beane’s alter ego, a writer named Car who reminisces about the summer of 1973, when he turned 15 and figured out that he was gay and a man of the theater. Spending most of his time with the Prometheus company helped with both.
Along with its fearless leader, Prometheus boasts the kind of colorful eccentrics who’d dedicate themselves to putting on Tennessee Williams plays in the boondocks. Not only is there a campy leading man, Clive (Lance Coadie Wiꦐlliams), but an ingenue, Maria (Zoë Winters), whom gruff stage manager Sid (Dale Soules) calls “the neediest actress in the world, and that’s saying something.”
“Shows for Days” is e♒xactly what you’d expect from a combo of coming-of-age story and love letter to the theater. But while it’s light on surprises, this Lincoln Center Theater production, expertly directed by Jerry Zaks, is a well-crafted hoot — this is Beane’s finest effort since “The Little Dog Laughed,” another vehicle for a larger-than-life comic whirlwind (in that case, Julie White).
Few contemporary writers share Beane’s facility for killer lines. Everybody gets choice ones here, but Irene lands the lioness’☂🔴 share.
“If theater was easy, the goyim would do it,” she says, and — when Car refuses to go onstage as needed — “Many are called, bu🐻t few are called back.”
Happily, Beane goes easy on the sentimentality that’s hampered some of his work, and when he puts the wit🎶ticisms on pause for a minute, the emotion is earned.
But in the end, it’s all ဣ😼about Irene and LuPone, two indomitable grandes dames on a collision course with theater. In that big bang, the audience wins.