Entertainment

Mostly great Scott brings ‘Rapture’ to the world

She’s starred in big, popular Broadway shows like “Aida,” “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” and “The Little Mermaid.” She’s been nominated for Tony and Drama Desk awards. She’s a blue-eyed blonde with great comic timing, and her singing could melt the polar ice cap.

Yet few outside of musical-theater circles are familiar with Sherie Rene Scott. It’s one of those head-scratching cosmic ironies, like Gerard Butler’s career: As good as Scott is, she’s not the kind of star producers build shows around.

So she took the matter into her own hands and did it herself.

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The result — the mostly solo, mostly autobiographical “Everyday Rapture” — had a well-received run last year at Second Stage. Now it’s on Broadway, the last-minute replacement for the Roundabout’s canceled “Lips Together, Teeth Apart.”

Under the direction of Michael Mayer (“Spring Awakening”) and with Dick Scanlan’s help on the book, Scott recounts her trajectory from Topeka, Kan., to Broadway through anecdotes, musings and well-chosen pop songs. But it’s a rather fanciful version of herself that Scott plays with wide-eyed, mock earnestness. And the “real Sherie” versus “stage Sherie” pairing is only one of the several on which the show is cleverly built.

Another binary is Jesus versus Judy (Garland), the two major influences over young Sherie, who grew up half-Mennonite. In a hilarious scene, Scott sings “You Made Me Love You” with tender devotion while a gallery of increasingly tacky Jesus paintings flashes on a screen.

And then there’s Kansas versus New York, which Sherie discovers during a trip in the summer of 1983. She wonderfully evokes the awakening she experienced through a fervent rendition of Harry Nilsson’s “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City,” but she doesn’t shy from the sojourn’s less-inspiring aftermath.

Sherie also pays the price of semi-fame when she recklessly starts trading e-mails with a flamboyant teenage fan (Eamon Foley).

The musical interludes are uniformly splendid. Backed by her two Mennonettes (Lindsay Mendez, Betsy Wolfe), Scott is a stylist in full control of her instrument. The low-key arrangements by Tom Kitt (“Next to Normal”) only enhance her amalgam of precision and warmth.

And yet the show sometimes feels out of joint. In a smaller setting, “Everyday Rapture” achieved a near-miraculous balance between narcissistic bravado, self-mocking and sentimentality. But the last weighs heavier here, and the inspirational tidbits take over.

If there’s a lesson in this, it’s that corn should stay in Kansas.

elisabeth.vincentelli
@nypost.com