‘HOW do you say no to Steve?”

That’s the question being posed sotto voce around Broad way this week about the great Stephen Sondheim and his not-so-great musical, “Bounce.”

The show, about the Mizner brothers, wraps up its run in Chicago next week. It then goes back into rehearsals for a month before pushing on to the Kennedy Center in Washington in October.

Chicago critics panned it, and so did I, bravely defying director Hal Prince’s edict forbidding the national press from reviewing it. A lot of Broadway heavy hitters who saw it gave it the thumbs-down, too. And yet there is still talk “Bounce” will land on Broadway this spring.

That’s because Sondheim and Prince want it there, and very few producers or theater owners are going to risk alienating these two theater legends by putting the kibosh on the show, even though it stands no chance of succeeding in New York.

Sure, Sondheim and his book writer, John Weidman, are rewriting and streamlining and fiddling.

Weidman admitted to The Times this week that the unwieldy show was “running off the edges of the table.”

But they’ve been writing this show for over 10 years and if they haven’t been able to crack it yet, I’m not holding out for a miracle.

And what about the great Hal Prince?

Surely he can whip a hit out of his boys. Why, he’s the man who, after seeing an ill-fated workshop a few years ago, announced all “Bounce” needed to succeed was “sex” – “a little T&A,” as he so charmingly put it.

What a laugh.

Everybody in the theater world knows that ever since Andrew Lloyd Webber made him super-rich by giving him “The Phantom of the Opera” to direct, Prince has hardly been one to roll up his sleeves when a show’s in trouble.

Lloyd Webber found this out when he asked Prince to stage “Whistle Down the Wind” a few years ago.

The day after it opened to scathing reviews in Washington, Prince was on a plane to France for a ski holiday.

True to form, Prince skipped over to Germany right after “Bounce” was trounced in Chicago.

Prince’s defenders say this is how the great man works – that he needs time away so he can see the show with “fresh eyes.”

Well, call me simple-minded, but I have a hard time seeing how a show in trouble gets fixed from a chairlift in the Alps or a spa in Baden Baden.

And make no mistake, “Bounce” needs a lot of work, including Prince’s own staging, which is alternately frenetic and wan, and never inventive.

A David Merrick-type producer wouldn’t stand for any of this, of course.

But the producers of “Bounce” aren’t that steely.

One, Arielle Tepper, is very young, very rich and completely in Prince’s thrall.

She lost a bundle on his last flop, “Hollywood Arms,” as well as on the off-Broadway musical “The Last Five Years,” written by Prince’s favorite young composer, Jason Robert Brown, and directed by his daughter, Daisy Prince.

Tepper will be willing to part with a few more millions if Prince and Sondheim insist on bringing “Bounce” to Broadway.

Her co-producer, the elegant and intelligent (and also very rich) Roger Berlind, is a different matter.

He’s not a pushover, but he’s known to be close to Sondheim and is said to be wary of losing the friendship, which is what would happen if he defied the notoriously prickly composer.

What Berlind needs to get out of this misbegotten project is a good excuse – and here he just might get one from a very important critic.

Not a New York critic, of course. For when it comes to their beloved Sondheim, New York’s notoriously vicious “wrecking crew” turns into a litter of kittens.

They never blame him when the show’s bad; it’s always the book writer, the director, the difficulty of the subject matter, the theater, the weather, their seats.

Never, ever Mr. Sondheim.

They should have reviewed “Bounce” in Chicago.

It was the world premiere of a new musical by a major composer and a major director at a major regional theater.

It was not an out-of-town tryout of a Broadway-bound show. “Bounce” hasn’t booked a New York theater yet, and in fact its creators have publicly said they don’t know if Broadway is even in its future yet (they’re being disingenuous, of course).

But Prince and Sondheim asked them not to review it, so, like good little soldiers, they did what they were told, filing puffy interviews with the actors.

The New York critics won’t be able to review it at the Kennedy Center in the fall, either, since by then I suspect “Bounce” will have officially booked a Broadway theater, and they will have to respect what will then be a real out-of-town tryout.

No, the critic who can save Roger Berlind about $3 million is The Washington Post’s Peter Marks.

He’s smart, tough and, though a Sondheim enthusiast, he will not pull his punches.

If he pans “Bounce,” then Berlind has found his escape hatch.

Only a fool wouldn’t take it.