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If Jay Rogers isn’t the funniest man in New York, he’s pretty damn close. This isn’t news to anyone who saw him do his stuff in his solo cabaret shows Broccoli Head, Sucker, and Yes, This Is My Real Voice, or to those who caught his turns in the Tweed Fraktured Classiks spoofs of such films as The Women, The Children’s Hour, and Harriet Craig. Even if you missed all of the above, you may well have been regaled by Rogers in Howard Crabtree’s supremely gay Off-Broadway extravaganzas Whoop-Dee-Doo! and When Pigs Fly. “Laughing Matters,” the lovely ballad that Mark Waldrop and the late Dick Gallagher wrote for him to sing in the latter show, was covered by no less a personage than Bette Midler on her Bathhouse Betty album.

Mister Rogers presented his new cabaret act Eat, Drink & Be Mary! for one memorable performance last month at the Metropolitan Room on West 22nd Street, and the great news is that he’ll reprise it at that fab new club on Friday and Saturday, July 21 and 22 at 8pm. The flyer for the show features photos of a whole bunch of Marys, from Mary Todd Lincoln to Mary Pickford to Mary Tyler Moore — but the musical selections have nothing to do with any of those ladies.

According to Rogers, “The theme of the show is ‘Have a good time, baby, because life don’t last forever.’ Lennie Watts [who runs the Metropolitan Room] asked me do a show on the Friday of Gay Pride weekend, and I thought, ‘Great, I only have to do it once!’ When he asked me to bring it back, I said yes — but it’s a little nerve-wracking, because we don’t have a recording of the show, and I don’t remember exactly what I said between the songs. So God only knows what will happen next week. I can’t say!”

Though Eat, Drink & Be Mary! has no official director, Rogers is indebted to Barry Kleinbort and Thommie Walsh for their input. Musical director Christopher McGovern suggested two numbers that Rogers has come to love: “The Sailor of My Dreams” from Dames at Sea, and “Old Friend” from the Gretchen Cryer-Nancy Ford musical I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road. Speaking of old friends, the title song of the act was written by Keith Thompson, Rogers’ longtime pal and colleague. Among the other selections, “I do ‘Think About Your Troubles,’ a Harry Nilsson song from The Point. There’s a beautiful ballad called ‘I Haven’t Got Anything Better to Do’ by the guys who wrote ‘Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini.’ I do ‘You Took Advantage of Me’ in a mini-medley with ‘I’ll Never Say “Never Again” Again,’ which I stole from Dinah Shore. And, because we originally did the show for Gay Pride, I included ‘Angels, Punks, and Raging Queens.’ Gosh, I love that song.”

Rogers hails from Misssissipi. I first met him almost 20 years ago when he was tending bar at Don’t Tell Mama on West 46th Street, the site of some of his subsequent cabaret shows; he still works happy hour shifts there to make extra cash between acting gigs. Recently, he played Mignon Mullen in My Deah, John Epperson’s Southern Gothic takeoff on Medea, which had a brief workshop run at the Abingdon Theatre with a cast headed by Nancy Opel and Bryan Batt. (The show is set for a full production at the Abingdon this fall.)

Before that, he played Max Detweiler in two separate productions of The Sound of Music, one at the Carousel Dinner Theatre in Akron and the other at Syracuse Stage. Rogers sings “No Way to Stop It” from that show in Eat, Drink & Be Mary! and shares some anecdotes of working with all those kiddies. For example: “I loved it when the girl who was playing the smart-ass child — what’s her name, Marta? — came up to me after the first reading in Syracuse and said, ‘You’re perfect for this part. You just scream Uncle Max!’ I thought, ‘Well, I’ve been given the okay by a ten-year-old theater hag. I’ve got it made.’ I was also happy that I had all the children calling each other ‘Mary’ and saying ‘Oh Mary, please!’ I don’t think their parents loved it, but I felt it was my job.”

He seems to have a knack for that sort of thing. “When we did a talkback at My Deah,” Rogers relates, “this guy said to me, ‘I saw you in Whoop-Dee-Doo! and you had such an effect on me that I was finally able to come out.’ My first reaction was, ‘Are you kidding?’ I couldn’t believe I had so much influence over someone when I was dressed as a banana. But he said it gave him the courage to tell his folks he was gay and live the kind of life he wanted to lead. I thought, ‘Well, that’s really something.’ ”

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ONE MORE KISS

The City Center Encores! series recently announced its 2007 season of musicals in concert, which will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first Ziegfeld Follies with three shows inspired by the form: Irving Berlin and Moss Hart’s Face the Music, about a desperate producer trying to raise money for his latest revue; Stairway to Paradise, a specially created show that will showcase some of the best material from a half century of Broadway revues; and the Stephen Sondheim-James Goldman masterpiece Follies, a tale of middle-aged and elderly people trying with various degrees of success to let go of the past, set at a reunion of former Follies performers in a theater that’s about to be torn down.

I for one am particularly delighted that Encores! has chosen Follies — and I wasn’t at all surprised when Jonathan Tunick, who so brilliantly orchestrated the show for its original production, told me how pleased he is that the score will once again be heard in New York as originally conceived. “Encores! has always used the original instrumentation plus a few extra strings,” Tunick said when I called him for a comment. “The orchestra for the original production of Follies was about 25, which was standard in those days. Even then, we only had what we used to refer to facetiously as a ‘full’ string section of six violins, two violas, and two cellos. The orchestra was augmented for the recording; again, it was standard procedure for the number of strings to be doubled for the cast albums.”

But not everyone is happy that Encores! will be doing Follies. The original mission of the series, which began in 1994 and has since become an essential part of NYC’s cultural landscape, was to present semi-staged concert versions of musicals that were considered unlikely to be revived in full productions, for one reason or another. This description fits most of shows that were presented during the series’ first several seasons — Allegro, Out of This World, DuBarry Was a Lady, etc. — but it certainly doesn’t apply to some of the more recent selections, such as Bye Bye Birdie and The Pajama Game. Indeed, the latter show had a full-scale Broadway revival this year, a mere four years after the Encores! concert.

Follies was not quite a hit in its legendary, original 1971 production, which starred Alexis Smith, Dorothy Collins, John McMartin, and Gene Nelson. The show may be the ultimate “cult” musical — and that cult has grown over the years, thanks to first-class stagings in London, at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, and elsewhere. In New York alone, Follies has had two high-profile outings since the original: the 1985 New York Philharmonic concert version and the Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2001 Broadway revival.

Ubiquitous though Follies may seem to be, here’s the sad truth: The chances that the show will ever again be presented in a full New York production with full orchestra are virtually zero. The current economics of Broadway are such that the money spent on any musical’s sets, costumes, lighting, etc., not to mention the salaries of the cast and crew, is so great that there is simply not enough money left over for a decent-size orchestra. Even the Roundabout, which gets away with paying its actors less than the usual Broadway rate because it’s a not-for-profit organization, couldn’t bring itself to spring for more than 14 musicians in the pit when it did Follies.

The prevailing view among producers is that its best to spend the bulk of the budget on a show’s visual elements because audiences can clearly see what they’re getting for their money, whereas most people’s ears aren’t well trained enough to tell the difference between a large and small orchestra — especially not when heavy sound amplification is so much a part of the experience. Of course, this view is not shared by Jonathan Tunick, who says: “I’ve spent my whole life trying to contribute to the theater, using the orchestra as my medium, so it’s disappointing to me that the powers in the theater today see this medium as dispensable. The orchestra has so much to contribute in terms of expressing subtext and mood. I’ve always thought of it as lighting for the ears. It will be a thrill to hear the Follies score played by a full orchestra at Encores!”