SHOW for DAYS with Patti Lupone, Stay Home

SHOW for DAYS at Lincoln Center is a fictionalized biopic love song to local community playhouses.  Douglas Carter Bean is a multi-Tony nom. playwright.  His intent was to show how vital theater is while being charming & witty.  What a pity.  It's overbearing & shitty.   Car (Michael Urie) plays the h.s. student who stumbles into a crumbling local rep.  Before you know it, he's an actor &  playwright. He becomes infatuated with live theater & 1 male actor in particular.  Car comes on a stage in the present as his adult self to take us back with him to Reading, PA in 1973, and a happen chance encounter with a flailing local rep. company.  He doubles as his teen self by removing his glasses, slinging on a backpack & adopting an incredulous act of naivety.  The set is barren except for multi-colored tape used as marks . Car spends too much time explaining to the audience what each area signifies and being a stagehand.  Irene (a grandiose Patti Lapone) is the mgr., star & driving force of the fledging company she considers family.  Basically, Irene, is an overblown do it all, know it all and will do anything to keep putting on a show.  Irene comes in like a wrecking ball. She stays in bombastic mode which is exhausting.  Congrats to Car i.e. (Bean) who keeps switching from 14 in 1973 to 42 today.  He lets the audience in on the successes & joys he's garnered from the theater; a Tony, a husband & family.  The show is stuffed to the gills with homosexual "inside" jokes it made me choke.  I did enjoy Clive (Lance Williams) who brought some levity. The wrecking ball was obsolete, the show was in shambles.  The best to hope for is someone on their phone to get a credible reaction from Lupone.