But never the twain have met.” There are roughly three punchlines in there, and, as with “beautiful,” Urie goes for four, and for the most part, nails them.

“It’s my biggest problem because I have never been young and beautiful. “I think my biggest problem is being young and beautiful,” Arnold confesses to us in the play’s second sentence, and Urie leans all the way into the character’s New York-of-days-gone-by accent (“beautiful” is four syllables). That’s the danger with a play that stokes its engine with the kind of broad, joke-a-minute humor we’re used to on small screens in 30-minute servings - or in stand-up sets, drag or otherwise. Kaufman’s actors are hitting all the same marks in all the same ways, and if it’s no longer your first time with the play (as it was for me a year ago), you might find yourself longing for more life under the laughs. But perhaps it’s not a matter of “and yet” so much as “and so”: There’s something mechanical about the production’s particular brand of glossy camp. Apart from those cuts it’s identical to its previous incarnation, give or take a few proportional adjustments in David Zinn’s retro-modular scenic design, and yet I found my response to it had cooled by more than a few degrees. Now, that production-directed by Moisés Kaufman and starring the elastic-featured Michael Urie as Arnold and Mercedes Ruehl as his formidable mother-has shed another 10 minutes and bounced a half block over to Broadway. Last year, Second Stage mounted a nipped-and-tucked, all-in-one-sitting revival of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, the three plays about the diehard romantic Jewish drag queen Arnold Beckoff that brought Fierstein to prominence in the late ’70s and won him Best New Play and Best Actor Tonys in 1983.

Torch Song loses some of its shine on a second viewing.

The torch song trilogy