Catty is his middle name, dear

NEW YORK — Mario Cantone strolls into a Chelsea cafe near his apartment and a waiter gives him a warm hello. Cantone is a regular. And in jeans and a hooded sweat shirt, he also seems like a regular guy.

The overbearing, gayer-than-gay Anthony Marentino from “Sex and the City” is calm and Zen-like, the hyperactive actor of his current solo comedy show on Broadway nowhere to be seen.

He orders water. “I gave up caffeine,” he says.

Mario Cantone sans caffeine? Surely a gag.

“Bad for the voice,” he explains.

It was hours before he was to transform himself for his show, “Laugh Whore,” in which he offers a parade of personalities, impersonating such stars as Shelley Winters, Cher, Michael Jackson and Julia Child.

The show, running at the Cort Theatre until Jan. 2, is an expletive-laden, campy performance and a demonstration of endurance. Cantone isn’t merely a comedian standing at a microphone making droll jokes. He sings, dances and skewers a very long list of celebrities and family members with biting charm.

In person, about the only clues that he makes people chuckle for a living are the laugh lines etched in his face. There are other wrinkles, too, across his forehead and between his brown eyes.

The cafe, called Matchbox, is a mellow place with a somewhat Turkish decor -- kilim-lined cushions and some reproduction Ottoman bric-a-brac. Cantone, slight and hunched over the table, takes in questions thoughtfully and answers calmly during an interview.

“His stage persona is not what he’s like in life,” director Joe Mantello said. “Onstage, he rides an electrical current between him and the audience.”

Cantone’s new show, which he wrote, is partly autobiographical. Members of his family, by way of impersonation, steal the show.

His upbringing in Stoneham, Mass., a suburb of Boston, was fertile ground for comic material. He grew up in an Italian-American family, his father a restaurateur, his mother a former big band singer. At Thanksgiving, dinner would be “lasagna shaped like turkey with a rigatoni wing and ricotta cheese leaking out the armpit.”

Cantone reveals himself -- and shows off the anger and fearlessness of his comedy -- through his impersonations of family members.

He remembers his late mother as controlling and comically out of control. She rips doors off the hinges and makes family pets disappear when they stain the carpet.

“She was like a hit man for all the animals in my family,” he says onstage.

His smoky-throated sister appears like a muse in the second act. Most of her lines are unprintable, but she has all the characteristics of Cantone’s stage character, summed up in the show’s final song.

“I’m crass, contemptuous and crude, obstreperous, obnoxious, rambunctiously raw and rude,” Cantone sings.

Cantone came to New York when he was 22, after graduating from Emerson College in Boston. He briefly lived in Los Angeles, a city he disliked, and got his start in stand-up at some of the city’s top comedy clubs. His new show gives him a bigger platform for his comedy and his diverse talents.

“Stand-up was like being on a Barbie townhouse stage,” he says.

Much of the material for the new show came from his stand-up routine. And some of his most important collaborators first encountered him while attending his stand-up performances.

Mantello, whom critics have credited with focusing Cantone’s sprawling talent in this show, first met Cantone after a performance 12 years ago. “I went reluctantly and thought he was amazing,” Mantello said.

“I wrote him a fan letter saying I hoped to work with him.” True to his word, Mantello later gave Cantone his Broadway start, casting him to replace Nathan Lane in “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and later in “Assassins.”

Another collaborator, fan and friend, Kim Cattrall, also discovered Cantone in a stand-up show shortly before he joined her on “Sex and the City” as her catty fashion fixer, Anthony Marentino.

While anger may be behind Cantone’s comedy, his appeal is exuberance, Cattrall said . “He says things with so much relish and verve that we can all relate,” she said in an interview.

Cattrall recently filmed a promo for Cantone’s show as an act of friendship. Cantone, she said, came to her rescue at the end of a difficult divorce.

“We went to Disney World without children,” she said. “We rode Space Mountain over and over again. It really helped.”

Cattrall and Mantello said Cantone’s stand-up routines showed versatile skills, which he has brought to Broadway.

“He’s an old-school entertainer,” Mantello said. “He doesn’t just tell jokes. He performs with an old-fashioned anger and energy.”

Anger is apparent in Cantone’s rapid-fire demolition of celebrities in the show’s first act, during which he savages Child, Jackson, Winters, Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland and others. But he confesses offstage that many of the victims are personal heroes and inspirations for his work, a contradiction Mantello calls a “strange homage to the performers he’s attracted to.”

Minnelli gets the worst of it. Cantone plays her wild-eyed, discussing all of her well publicized misadventures and singing a song titled “I Ain’t Finished Yet,” which concludes, “It’s all about me! Just me, for me, ah, me!”

But Cantone says he knows Minnelli and is fond of her.

“I hope Liza Minnelli, if she sees this, knows how much I adore her talent,” he says.

Cantone’s year in comedy clubs also taught him to diversify his routine.

When he started in comedy clubs in the 1980s, it was hard to be openly gay onstage.

“I had a lot of fear when I was younger, because I thought I wasn’t mainstream,” he says. “I think being gay and being nervous about bringing it out, forced me to reach for other material.”

The current show may not be mainstream, but some think Cantone is ready for a broader audience.

Showtime plans to telecast the show. Some viewers might not be ready, but that doesn’t bother Cantone.

“I like the title,” he says. “It keeps the squeamish away.”