ONCE Huck, twice shy. Or so it seemed for Daniel Jenkins, who played Huckleberry Finn the first time “Big River” splashed onto Broadway, and was asked – for the revival that opens on Broadway Thursday – to voice Huck again.

Literally.

Though the 40-year-old Jenkins plays Mark Twain in this “Big River” – a collaboration between the Roundabout Theatre Company and Los Angeles’ tiny, Deaf West Theater – he’s also singing and talking for Huck.

Tyrone Giordano, the young, expressive and hearing-impaired actor who is actually playing Huck, delivers his lines in sign language.

Getting one Huck out of two actors is the challenge.

“I didn’t want to repeat something I’d done before,” Jenkins tells The Post, “but this is like apples and oranges. It’s totally different.

“The most challenging part is trying to match, physically and emotionally, with Ty. We have to agree about where we are emotionally or it looks funky – like bad looping in a Japanese movie.

“We’ve come up with this term – hang gliding. The signs are just flying by and there’s no real word I can see until we get to the end of a sentence, and we land together.”

Like the other hearing actors in the show – 11 in all, along with seven deaf actors, “Children of a Lesser God” star Phyllis Frelich among them – Jenkins learned sign language for the role. (He signs all his lines as Mark Twain.)

He admits he wasn’t a quick study.

“At first, I went incredibly slowly,” Jenkins says. “You’re signing and talking and thinking, ‘What am I supposed to be saying with my hands here?’

“Because it’s not a word-to-word translation. And like any language, it has slang and idiom.”

Case in point: When Jenkins’ Huck says, “You don’t mean it, do you Tom?,” Giordano’s eloquent, signed shorthand is, “True biz?”

“It’s wild,” Jenkins says, happily. “Like ballet for the hands. My kids” – ages 5 and 8 – are insane about it. They’re making up their own sign language, because I can’t teach it to them fast enough!”