A whirlwind tour of Broadway's romance

Using their veteran stars, Eileen Cella and Sonny Leo, Act II Playhouse is serving up a delicious midsummer treat, Broadway on Butler. Created by Leo, this fast-paced 90-minute musical revue offers a full slate of 27 Broadway songs that brilliantly telescopes the history of the Great American Songbook.

Elegantly dressed in formal attire, Cella and Leo are joined by Patrick Romano. With their distinctive vocals, the trio is equally adept at solo and group performance. The stage is bare except for three stools and an upright piano in the corner. Leo uses recorded background music, but sometimes he plays piano to accompany the more pensive solo pieces, such as Stephen Sondheim's "Being Alive" (Romano) and Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Hello, Young Lovers" (Cella).

The challenge of a revue show is engaging the audience without the beneficial tension of an actual story. This trio fully rises to the challenge. Like rascally, high-spirited children unwilling to go to school, they suffuse the witty and urbane wordplay of these Broadway standards with quixotic gambits of their own devising.

When performing together they wonderfully act out the comic drama inherent in many of the numbers, as in Sondheim's "Not Getting Married Today" or Cole Porter's "Friendship." But you never know what they are going to do. In Irving Berlin's "There's No Business Like Show Business," they take turns telling stories about their onstage mishaps and improvisational rescues. Cella wittily changes a Cole Porter song into "Act II's darn hot," a comical pitch to raise funds to repair the theater's temperamental temperature control.

The trio say goodnight by taking turns with solos of songs by Kander and Ebb. Soft tenor Romano delivers on the pathos of "Mr. Cellophane" (from Chicago). With her robust mezzo-soprano, Cella knocks out a fine rendition of bawdy "Don't Tell Mama" (Cabaret), while baritone Leo brings out the comic-tragic undertones of "And the World goes 'Round" (New York, New York).

Broadway is a magical tour of one of the greatest 20th-century art forms. And with all your invested memories, your life, too, is honored.

"Broadway on Butler," through July 24 at Act II Playhouse, 56 E. Butler Ave., Ambler. Tickets: $25-33. Information: 215-654-0200, www.act2.org