There must be a better way to get your foot in the door at “Late Show With David Letterman.”
A boozed-up, down-on-his-luck Broadway actor wannabe bizarrely kicked his way through the front glass door of Letterman’s famed Ed Sullivan Theater at Broadway and West 53rd Street early yesterday, and then trashed the studio lobby, authorities said.
“The inside looked like it was a drunken bar brawl,” a law-enforcement source told The Post.
A roommate of the suspect, James Whittemore, 22, of Manhattan, said the struggling song-and-dance man started drinking around midnight Saturday before winding up at Hurley’s Saloon on West 48th Street — a few blocks from the Sullivan.
Whittemore left Hurley’s at about 5:30 a.m. yesterday and fell asleep on the sidewalk near the theater.
He woke up at around 7 a.m. and was enraged to discover his cellphone missing, sources said.
Whittemore — who has appeared in musical revues in Atlantic City and Niagara Falls — was caught on surveillance video urinating on one of the theater lobby’s glass doors and then kicking through it, cops said.
On the tape, Whittemore can be seen using a velvet-rope stanchion inside the lobby to smash the theater’s other two glass doors, authorities said. He eventually turned his wrath on an old box office, where he allegedly smashed a printer.
Cops soon arrived, and Whittemore is seen quickly dropping to the ground and placing a stanchion across his throat in an attempt to play possum and victim, the sources said.
A moment later, he apparently changed his mind and hid behind the smashed box office.
When cops ordered him to surrender, Whittemore crawled out and was taken into custody.
He was brought to Roosevelt Hospital and treated for a gash to his head, the sources said.
Whittemore was later charged with burglary and criminal mischief.
He was walked, smirking, to court for an arraignment hearing, where he was seen laughing to his guards.
“[The media] are waiting for me. They know what I did, I’m known,” he said.
Whittemore’s roommate, Charles McGowan, 28, was stunned to hear of his pal’s drunken fracas.
McGowan, who lives with Whittemore on West 135th Street, said his roomie is originally from Connecticut and tends bar.
“He’s a good kid with a good heart,” McGowan said.
Additional reporting by Doug Auer, Hannah Rappleye, Frank Rosario and Perry Chiaramonte