‘Broadway’s Best’ a Little Off Broadway

Let’s blame Reba McEntire.

The country music star scored a big hit on Broadway in “Annie Get Your Gun.” Maybe she inspired other practitioners of other pop styles to sing Broadway songs too.

That they want to do so is the theory behind “Broadway’s Best From Bravo,” on the cable network Monday and March 9 at 8 p.m. But some of the singers on this show are not ready for Broadway--or even for a local civic light opera.

Let’s start with the others, however. Opening the show, Cyndi Lauper is the only performer in the entire two hours who genuinely plays a character. She’s even in costume, as a middle-aged Broadway usher. She starts in the aisle, tentatively singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and finally goes on stage for a moment of persuasive belting before returning to her duties.

Joan Osborne’s “Not While I’m Around” from “Sweeney Todd” sounds pretty good too, although her habit of brushing her hair back with her hand is annoying.

A duet featuring Shawn Colvin and playwright-actor Harvey Fierstein in “Do You Love Me?” from “Fiddler on the Roof” is by far the funniest segment of the show. She sings Tevye’s lines, while he croaks the lines usually sung by Golde, Tevye’s wife, complete with pointed double takes.

Then there are the show’s ringers--real Broadway stars who have been incorporated into this format that’s ostensibly devoted to non-Broadway performers. They tend to look more confident and sound more comfortable than most of the others.

Linda Eder, best known for “Jekyll & Hyde,” is on hand--not surprising in that her husband, “Jekyll” composer Frank Wildhorn, is the show’s “artistic director.” At least Wildhorn refrained from including his own songs. Adam Pascal and Daphne Rubin-Vega sing “What You Own” from “Rent,” in which they starred. In the most blatant violation of the show’s stated philosophy, the dancers from “Contact” perform that show’s “Simply Irresistible.”

Kevin Bacon, who with his sibling Michael leads the Bacon Brothers band, also happens to be on Broadway right now in the play “An Almost Holy Picture.” Here, the brothers sing “Easy to Be Hard” from “Hair.”

Trisha Yearwood, Darius Rucker of Hootie & the Blowfish, Jill Scott and George Benson all turn in respectable performances, although Benson also stretches the concept of the show in singing “On Broadway”--which was his own 1978 hit, years before it was literally on Broadway in “Smokey Joe’s Cafe.”

Loudon Wainwright III’s two selections from “Guys and Dolls” should deter him from doing his own solo version of the whole show. Instead of singing “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat,” he should obey the command of the lyric.

Even worse is Jamie-Lynn Sigler of “The Sopranos” singing “I Feel Pretty” and “Give My Regards to Broadway” on the level of a high school ingenue--didn’t Meadow graduate and go on to Columbia last season?

But the nadir of the show is in two selections sung by Mandy Moore. She recalls how she did “Adelaide’s Lament” from “Guys and Dolls” in sixth grade, and it sounds as if she hasn’t made much progress since, especially in figuring out Adelaide’s New York accent. She teams with Pascal for “Suddenly Seymour” from “Little Shop of Horrors,” “little” being an apt description of her voice.

The performance was shot in an arena-style ballroom last November, leading to plenty of varied camera angles that help distract us from the likes of Moore.

“Broadway’s Best From Bravo” on Monday and March 9 at 8 p.m. on Bravo.