No Need to Shed Tears for LuPone : Theater review: Her triumphant one-woman show is a celebration of musicals.

All Patti LuPone has to do is raise both her arms in a white spotlight, and the audience goes nuts. That moment, of course, signals “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” LuPone’s signature number from “Evita.” Broadway musical stars often inspire a cult of personality, where the singer, the song and the role all meld to create an intensity that is ether to an adoring audience. LuPone provides high after high for theatergoers in her return to Broadway, after being publicly rebuffed in favor of Glenn Close for the part of Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard.”

“Patti LuPone on Broadway,” at the Walter Kerr Theatre, is a concert-style celebration of the singer’s career and of an eclectic bunch of musicals that made her famous. But more than that, it is a celebration of the musical theater itself, delivered with absolutely no self-importance from LuPone.

Her unmistakable and gutsy voice may not always be perfect, but her charisma is. In song after song, LuPone demonstrates a remarkable hold on her audience, who soak up a melange of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Stephen Sondheim, Stephen Schwartz and others. In particular, her several Kurt Weill offerings in the first act, especially the lovely “It Never Was You,” have the perfect amount of rue.

Starting with “I Get a Kick Out of You” from one of her triumphs, the 1988 “Anything Goes,” LuPone enters in black velvet pants and a white dinner jacket, a kind of classic entertainment ensemble. She cries profusely in Weill’s “Surabaya Johnny,” and she rips into Sondheim’s “Being Alive,” from “Company.” She is backed by a quartet of male singers and a superb seven piece on-stage orchestra.

In its bawdier moments, her patter owes a lot to Bette Midler. But LuPone’s deftly told war stories are all her own. Under the direction of Scott Wittman, her second act is a tour of duty that takes us through the shows “The Robber Bridegroom,” “Oliver!,” “The Baker’s Wife,” “Evita,” “Anything Goes,” “Les Miserables” and, of course, “Sunset Boulevard.”

LuPone takes an attitude of good-humored disgust at the betrayal, at one point offering what looks to be a pointed critique of Glenn Close’s dementia in the role of Norma Desmond. LuPone turns a similarly skeptical analysis to most of her own career.

Particularly funny is the story of being in a big flop, Stephen Schwartz’s “The Baker’s Wife,” in which the producers’ desperation during the six-month road to Broadway led to a firing frenzy, a blood bath that included the original leading lady (“she was the lucky one,” says LuPone, the replacement). As the show’s lead, LuPone describes the rather dispiriting experience of looking out at the 2,700 seat Kennedy Center and seeing 25 people in the audience.

In the original London cast of “Les Miserables,” LuPone confides that she got sick of the show, so much so that one night she stopped listening for her second-act cue in favor of reading magazines and smoking. One frenzied knock on the door sent her flying downstairs, leaving star Colm Wilkinson stranded onstage for 16 beats. Making her entrance from the wrong side of the stage, she noticed the character of Eponine for the first time, she says, since she had heretofore thought only about her own part. She listened to the young woman sing and thought, “No kidding--all that happened to you? Tonight?”

Offering a view of her Norma Desmond from the “Sunset Boulevard” she performed in London, LuPone sings “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” making it both real and moving. “We were young together,” she sings, reflectively, and an audience who has clearly followed her career seemed to once again receive the lyric in a highly personal context. When LuPone got to the line “I’ve come home at last!” the audience once again exploded in joy. After seeing “Patti LuPone on Broadway,” which has only one, irreplaceable star, no one will cry for her again, if anyone ever did.

* “Patti LuPone on Broadway,” with the singers Bryon Motley, Josef Powell, Gene Van Buren, John West. The Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St., (800) 432-7250. Through Nov . 18.