Midler, in All Her Shameless Divine Glory

Bless Bette!

Any other pop performer in the glow of such a hit movie as “First Wives Club” would have milked that sucker for all it was worth on Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Anyone else would have included some clips from the film and inside stories about life on the set with co-stars Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn and probably even would have sung “You Don’t Own Me,” that oldie from the movie.

But not our Bette Midler. She’s too smart and original a talent to resort to such obvious theatricality, right?

Well, not really--and that’s why audiences love her.

One of the reasons for Midler’s liberating appeal is that she will turn to every cliche at her disposal, whether from show business or everyday life, to make us laugh at ourselves and each other.

“Seen any good movies lately?” she asked teasingly about 25 minutes into her nearly two-hour show, a huge grin on her face.

Barely waiting for the audience to acknowledge the reference, she burst into the kind of kick-up-your-heels celebration that most actors must feel, but rarely express, after unexpected triumphs in the highly competitive box-office wars.

“I’m in a hit . . . a big [expletive] hit . . ., “ she continued before mentioning all the hot male stars, including Michael Douglas and Bruce Willis, who had films out opposite “First Wives Club” during its opening week.

“Well,” she added gleefully, “they were all ham on toast by Sunday night [when box-office tallies are reported].”

Although Midler went through some spectacular theatrical routines in this concert (an update of her “Experience the Divine” show from 1993), including her celebrated wheelchair chorus line, she was most alive in timely, witty monologues, when nothing was sacred.

In a theater that is a source of civic pride, she gazed up at the split balconies and jagged architectural elements and asked with mock innocence: “Did the earthquake do this?”

She also made fun of things we share and hold private, peppering the mostly over-35 crowd with barbs about self-help infomercials, the hell of the aging process and politics.

With a lesser talent, Tuesday’s show could have been a disaster. It was so ragged at times that it seemed more like a rehearsal.

Backed by an aggressive seven-piece band and a small army of singers and dancers, Midler lost her place at several points, even forgetting to deliver the punch line to a joke about Reba McEntire. Near the end, she had to stop to go over the words to a song with her bandleader.

Yet she used her wits to recover so smoothly from that episode that it seemed the whole thing had been a routine. “This wouldn’t happen if I had one of those machines like Barbra,” she quipped, referring to Barbra Streisand’s use in concert of TelePrompTers.

As a singer, Midler was wonderfully touching during songs that gave her genuine emotional foundation, like “Miss Otis Regrets.” But she seemed simply workmanlike during the mushy hit ballads “From a Distance” and “Wind Beneath My Wings.”

Listening to her sing them Tuesday, it was hard not to believe that a part of Midler would love nothing better than to lampoon them. Now that would be something truly Divine.

* Bette Midler appears Dec. 23-24 at the Universal Amphitheatre, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City, 8:15 p.m. $50.50-$68. (818) 622-4440.