Last night was opening night of “Manilow on Broadway,” at the St. James Theatre. Hundreds of Barry Manilow fans, some ornery in fake-fur coats, many short and white-haired, some young and sleek, lined up outside. In the lobby, a woman showed a film crew the yearbook she’d brought, presumably from Manilow’s Brooklyn high school: rows of black-and-white pictures, one page signed in a lavish script. Inside the theatre, a friendly usher handed out a green glow stick with each program. A bit of theatrical fog floated in the air. The front of the stage was dotted with Kleenex boxes—a wry gesture acknowledging that opening night was a week late. Manilow was sick last week and all shows were cancelled, which had Manilow talking about jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge and having Jewish guilt and being so overcome with love from fans that he wanted to buy everybody a Buick. Now he is better.

Was that man in the center front Clive Davis, the record executive who made Manilow’s career? Yes, it was. And there was Carson Kressley, the former “Queer Eye” guy, and there was Rosanna Scotto, from Channel 5. Crisply dressed men greeted one another. One of them explained to his neighbors that he was a friend of Barry’s. “Very nice guy,” he said, shaking his head as if the niceness were not to be believed or outdone.

The house lights went down, then red lights swirled around. It was not a surprise that this was happening, or that the spotlight was shaped something like a heart, or that the background music before showtime had been early Beatles and late Sting, a mélange that one theatregoer described as “Sirius Café.” It was a surprise, as the lights flashed onto the audience, to hear the opening notes of Underworld’s “Born Slippy (Nuxx),” the 1996 U.K. trance song made famous by the movie “Trainspotting.” Yet, like Barry Manilow, the beginning of “Born Slippy (Nuxx)” is undeniably exciting. Into the song’s electronic beats floated snippets of Manilow songs, like twists in a drink. The curtain rose. The crowd was on its feet, cheering and waving their glow sticks. For a second, “Manilow on Broadway” was more like a rave than you might have expected.

There he was: Barry Manilow, sixty-nine years old, spiffy in a black dinner jacket, black pants, and white shirt; hair moussed and mussed; face lifted. His expression was one of joy. He waved his arms, bowed, laughed, rolled his eyes. Aww, shucks. He loves his people and his people love him. He looks, as Dick Clark once did, or as Joan Rivers and Liza Minnelli do now, like an entertainment survivor, a person in whom youth and age are in a playful and public war. He is no less lovable—he is, maybe, even more lovable—for the fact that he appears to be animatronic.

He sang “It’s a Miracle,” and the crowd understood why. His voice sounded good, but he hadn’t been faking the cold. He hit his marks, there and in the songs that followed, but he didn’t try for every huge swell, every full-throated blast. He knew exactly what he could do that night, at his age and after this cold, and he did it. He turned the wrenching “Could It Be Magic” into a disco number, to the secret disappointment of a few, but it was too much fun to dampen the mood. “Hello, New York!” he said. “We made it to Broadway!” Then he sang “Give My Regards to Broadway.” Every song felt like a big finish; every song had a big finish, and he grabbed it with his hand and pumped his fist. He mentioned some of the big shows that have played at the St. James—“Hello Dolly,” “Oklahoma!,” “The Producers”—and said that he was proud to be in their company but that his show was something different. “All I got is a whole bunch of hit songs, and I’m going to do them all,” he said.

“He’s very self-congratulatory,” an observer whispered. He is, for sure. The fans love Manilow, and he loves himself, too. He has nothing to prove, and it’s very relaxing. He’s not a prickly diva who only wants to play his new stuff. He’s had enough success—in the seventies and eighties, but also with recent chart-topping albums of covers of hits from various decades—to reward the people with what they want. It’s the same sort of pleasurable effect as when Stephen Colbert introduces each guest with a victory lap for himself.

He did play the hits—“The Old Songs,” “Weekend in New England,” “I Made It Through the Rain.” He had a few costume changes—a magenta jacket, a black shirt, a white jacket. For “Bandstand Boogie,” he showed black-and-white film of himself on “American Bandstand,” with Dick Clark. He encouraged a sing-along to “Can’t Smile Without You,” and the whole crowd, on its feet, sang its heart out.

He performed “Brooklyn Blues” against a backdrop of slides of Brooklyn, talked about his tough high school (“Can you imagine me in a gang?”; another eye roll) and the orchestra he joined there, the musical education that was his ticket out. He talked about his grandfather and played a recording of the two of them, old man and little boy, in a booth in Times Square. We were continually reminded that he is a Brooklyn kid. He grew up in a “dump” of an apartment there. He told us that in Manhattan, in his first studio apartment, he slept under a grand piano. He has a slight accent, too, and says things like “Last week I had enough phlegm to float Fire Island.” This all encourages the idea that Manilow’s style, the showmanship that veers into schlock—“Copacabana,” for example, sung in front of a cartoon of tropical fruit, bananas and pomegranates flying around, dizzying and kaleidoscopic—isn’t such a crime against art. It’s an old Brooklyn version of what Dolly Parton, describing her own style, has cheerfully called “a country girl’s idea of glamour.”

Toward the end of the show, Manilow disappeared, and a color TV clip played: young Barry, in a sequinned blue shirt and white pants, and sporting a longish mop of hair, talking with young Clive Davis, and then sitting at a white piano and playing “Mandy.” Midway through, the Barry of today reappeared, sat at a black piano, and joined him. This Barry couldn’t hit young Barry’s notes quite the same way, but was perhaps twice as beloved—the two of them created another infinite loop of crowd joy.

Everybody knew the words to the finale, the big finish of big finishes: Manilow is music, of course, and he writes the songs. Another sing-along, an explosion of confetti over our heads, and then home, in white limousines, black limousines, and subways.

Photograph: Stiletto Entertainment.