Entertainment

More like a steady drizzle

A Steady Rain” is a meat-and-potatoes play served on a sil ver platter.

In case you’ve lived under a broadband-free rock for the past few months, the show pairs up Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman. This isn’t a completely gratuitous stunt: Both have stage experience — Jackman even won a Tony for “The Boy From Oz.”

Still, their mere presence ensured that “A Steady Rain” would sell out its limited Broadway run. Actually, it ensured that Keith Huff’s mawkish, labored two-hander about Chicago cops would get a Broadway run to begin with.

Huff’s idea of thinking outside the box begins and ends with his naming the Irish character Joey (Craig) and the Italian one Denny (Jackman). Everything else is steeped in hoary convention, from the flashback structure to the tone, dripping with tough-guy attitude.

Side by side on a bare stage, Denny and Joey reflect back on the case that irreversibly changed their lives. The characters are drawn with a heavy hand, and Huff’s attempts to add some shading mostly fall flat.

Bad-boy Denny takes kickbacks on the job but his domestic life, complete with wife and kids, is relatively settled. Responsible Joey goes to sensitivity training but also has a drinking problem and can’t get a date. That’s about it for layers.

When things come to a head in a mishmash involving a lactating prostitute, a violent pimp, a serial killer and a puppy — sadly, they aren’t all together in a bar — Joey must re-examine his lifelong relationship with his hotheaded friend and partner.

Because the story is told in alternating monologues, the two actors rarely interact. This deprives the show of the much-needed energy the collision of these two particular particles might have created.

Jackman is vastly appealing, as usual, but he’s also miscast as Denny, a character that would have been perfect for the saturnine Al Pacino in the ’70s. The Australian actor sure is a sight for sore eyes, but he’s not entirely convincing as a troublemaker with an appetite for self-destruction.

Craig, his upper lip swallowed whole by a police-issue mustache, fares better and single-handedly lifts up the show. He adeptly suggests a measure of slightly scary intensity boiling just under a seemingly placid lid.

Stuck with two guys reminiscing for 90 minutes, director John Crowley (“The Pillowman”) resorts to pulling Scott Pask’s beautiful sets in and out of the shadows at key dramatic points. It’s impressive but feels like a desperate attempt to give the audience something to look at.

In the end, it all circles back to the middling writing. Typically, a big plot point revolves around the fact that Denny and Joey believe a blond surfer dude is, as he claims, the uncle of a distraught Vietnamese boy. Are we really meant to think these guys are morons?

Craig and Jackman were clearly eager to appear onstage together. Too bad they picked a clunky squad car for a vehicle.

elisabeth.vincentelli
@nypost.com