MARTIN SHORT: FAME BECOMES ME

(two stars)

Bernard J. Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue; (212) 239-6200.

THEY lie to you. They tell you talent is enough. But it’s never enough. Even genius is not enough. You need something called material.

That was shown – or rather not shown – abundantly last night at the Bernard J. Jacobs Theatre, where the show “Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me” seemed buried neck-deep in talent. And I don’t mean just the phenomenally gifted Short himself.

The entire blissfully supportive supporting cast – Brooks Ashmanskas, Mary Birdsong, Capathia Jenkins, Nicole Parker and Marc Shaiman – stood almost as tall in the talent bracket.

There is even a variable guest celebrity slot – at the performance I saw it was filled by Tracy Ullman – following the precedent of an earlier Broadway venture, “The Play What I Wrote.” (If you ask “What?” to that, don’t worry, I understand – it wasn’t around for too many guest celebrities.)

Yet all the King’s horses and all the King’s men don’t help if the damned wall doesn’t stand up.

The show – conceived by Short and Scott Wittman – trades on Short’s own delicious brand of fatuous irony, daring absurdity and beautifully self-destructive egotism.

Wait, that makes it sound better than it is.

For despite Short’s edgy charm, which is considerable, the evening itself is simply a series of revue vignettes hung on a kind of autobiographical clothesline from the hero’s unexceptional birth in Hamilton, Ontario, to his modest stardom in Hollywood.

The music and lyrics by Shaiman and Wittman – of “Hairspray” repute – are essentially unmemorable and certainly unhummable, leaving the highly talented cast rubbing shticks together in the hope of igniting some kind of theatrical fire.

Too many, unfortunately, are simply damp squibs.

The dance pastiches of Tommy Tune and Bob Fosse – in both of which Ashmanskas is hilariously clever – and some of the sly impersonations, such as Parker undulating horrifically as a demented Ellen DeGeneres, or Short both as a raspy voiced, cruelly trembling Katharine Hepburn and a plummy-toned Richard Burton, have the right pungency and bite.

And it wouldn’t be a Short show if our hero did not introduce one or two of his TV alter-egos, such as that fearless interviewer, the chin-challenged and otherwise obnoxious Jiminy Glick, and the cigar-chomping Broadway producer, Irving Cohen.

The talent is there. But what “Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me” needed was a real producer/director who could trim and edit, prod and probe, and make a proper vehicle for these people, rather than an ambling hobbyhorse for the hard-working and infinitely adorable Short.

Here – through no one’s fault but his own – Short is very much short-changed.