The (seething) man who would be Cher : Theater review 'Laugh whore'. Mario Cantone's rage-driven one-man show at the Cort Theater is a gay and giddy delight

C. Isherwood

For indisputable evidence that comedy is fueled by anger, as the adage has it, take a gander at Mario Cantone's face as he approaches a payoff line in "Laugh Whore," the handsomely gussied-up stand-up comedy show that opened at Broadway's Cort Theater last night. The dancing eyebrows flatline. The jaw settles into a strained grimace. The soft brown eyes are transformed into bottomless pools of hostility. Suddenly that amiably yapping puppy has become a snarling Doberman. Yikes!Oddly, Mr. Cantone is most appealing when he's seething. When he pulls aside the mask of an aggressively likable persona to reveal the volcano of outrage underneath we most prize him.This is probably because most of us have to keep our masks on. If a cabdriver ignores our advice, we cannot channel the spirit of Faye Dunaway-as-Joan Crawford, as Mr. Cantone does, and emit a strangled cry from the back seat: "Why ... must ... you ... defy me?!" It would probably be useless, and it would definitely be humiliating. But it is a cathartic pleasure to watch Mr. Cantone enact this small drama of urban vengeance.Mr. Cantone is probably best known as one of the gay accessories sported by the "Sex and the City" gals to match their Manolos (he was Charlotte's confidant, the hostile-but-lovable Anthony). He has made several appearances as an actor on Broadway, memorably playing a musical-theater-obsessed melancholic in Terrence McNally's "Love! Valour! Compassion!" and a musical-theater-obsessed psychotic in the recent revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Assassins." As perhaps can be inferred from that brief career-highlights reel - casting is often typecasting, like it or not - Mr. Cantone is gay. Much of the funniest material in "Laugh Whore" expresses a buoyantly, exuberantly, even belligerently gay sensibility. Mr. Cantone may be an ideal comedian for the digital-cable generation, jumping haphazardly from subject to subject like a bored viewer with an itchy clicker finger. But he tends to settle on channels showing things like reruns of the "Cher" variety hour, on which this solo show, with its mod white set by Robert Brill, could have been modeled. (Mr. Cantone himself gets to play all the special guest stars.)