Emotional ride with a larger-than-life Elaine Stritch

“It’s scary up here, OK?” Elaine Stritch says in a small, vulnerable voice.

Dressed in just a long white shirt and black hose, the 78-year-old actress is the sole occupant of the Ahmanson Theatre’s vast stage.

Yet she has been filling it all by herself, making great moments in entertainment history come alive in stories about Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim, or dead-on impressions of Noel Coward and Ethel Merman. She has acknowledged her hard-drinking days, analyzed a few failed romances and -- in the whiskey-voiced, worldly-wise, tough-as-nails persona that is her trademark -- she has just finished the Sondheim survival anthem “I’m Still Here” by gleefully jumping up and down and punching the air with her fists.

Scared? Get outta town.

Yet there she is, in the middle of her award-winning show “Elaine Stritch at Liberty,” looking very alone. And suddenly, it all makes sense -- why we’re so fascinated by the artifice of performing, why we live vicariously through the often dramatic, very public actions of our stars. Because if this snowy-haired dynamo can persevere through all she has, and become a legend in the process, then maybe -- just maybe -- we can get through the day as well.

Though not well-known to the broader public because fame in film and television eluded her, Stritch has been a theatrical favorite in such presentations as Coward’s “Sail Away,” Sondheim’s “Company” and the Harold Prince revival of “Show Boat.”

In “At Liberty” (which she constructed with John Lahr, with New York Public Theater’s George C. Wolfe as director), Stritch is show business personified. She is full of stories that begin something like: “And there was this boy in my acting class,” a pause and then, nonchalantly, “Marlon Brando.” She has a gift for delivering lines in little throwaways, which turn into big laughs. And she sings in a conversational style that turns lyrics into the powerful dramatic monologues that they really are. Her husky, raspy voice isn’t beautiful but, boy, is it expressive as she roars, yowls or even yells, if that is what the song makes her feel. In the pit, pianist-conductor Rob Bowman beautifully and understatedly leads a nine-piece band through Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations.

Reminiscences take Stritch from a childhood near Detroit and schooling at the Convent of the Sacred Heart to the storied streets of New York, where she becomes, in the words of another Sondheim song, a “Broadway Baby.”

Good-naturedly acknowledging some of the qualities that have helped yet hindered her career, she explains that she was cast as Ethel Merman’s standby in “Call Me Madam” because, “I was 20, I looked 40; I got the job.”

She delivers behind-the-scenes stories about her most famous role -- as the boozy, flirtatious Joanne in “Company” -- in snippets between verses of Sondheim’s wry ode to marriage “The Little Things You Do Together,” in effect, turning the song into a description of her loving if occasionally dysfunctional matrimony to the theater.

As part of this section, Stritch, of course, sings the song she famously originated, which she aptly describes as “Stephen Sondheim’s three-act play, ‘The Ladies Who Lunch.’ ” Repeatedly, the song uses “I’ll drink to that” as a toast to well-to-do women, like Joanne, who hide behind everything from self-improvement courses to booze. Stritch barks the phrase, her eyes filled with anger and defiance.

It’s an open secret that Stritch’s real-life drinking habits eerily mirrored Joanne’s, and the actress forthrightly confronts the issue, taking the audience inside alcoholism as she describes the vulnerability and fear that once prevented her from stepping onto the stage “alone,” without a stiff drink or two for moral support.

Stritch also confesses a tremendous naivete about love, which comes as a surprise, given her persona. Singing about failed romance in the interwoven lyrics of the Gershwins’ “But Not for Me” and Coward’s “If Love Were All,” her voice breaks with emotion as she pours her loneliness into the words, “I believe that since my life began, the most I’ve had is just a talent to amuse.”

Though she has triumphantly performed this show in New York and London, Stritch got lost a few times during Wednesday’s opening performance. It just made her vulnerability all the more apparent.

She strips away layer after layer to reveal that she is just a woman underneath. But, oh, what a woman.

*

‘Elaine Stritch at Liberty’

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5 p.m.; also April 22, 8 p.m.

Ends: April 27

Price: $25-$68

Contact: (213) 628-2772 or www.TaperAhmanson.com

Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes