Jamie Cesa left a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan and admired the gathering that had assembled on the sidewalk during the time it took him to eat a steak salad.

Dozens of well-groomed men and women waited outside the neighboring Helen Hayes Theater. In a few moments, they would be ushered inside to watch the curtain rise for "Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway," a politically charged and gay-tinged cabaret spoof that Cesa, a Hawthorne native, co-produced.

The show has also been a surprise hit, which is a feather in the cap of a first-time Broadway producer like Cesa. "Standing in front of the theater before a show is just about the greatest thrill in my life right now," he said.

"See, this is the most fun," Cesa, 41, said as he approached the theater. He angled his shoulder and sliced through the crowd like a seasoned pro. No one noticed him, even though he is one of the reasons why they were here.

"No one knows the producer," he said.

But they know his work. Cesa, who has a medium build and a shaved head, edged past the line and stepped up to the ticket window. There, he paused and peered over several sets of shoulders. "Billy Crystal," he whispered, the excitement brimming in his voice. "That ... That feels really good," he said.

A rave review is one thing. A celebrity endorsement is another. A celebrity buying a ticket is something spectacularly different.

Few people are more pleased than Cesa. For more than a decade, he has struggled to grab attention like this -- however fleeting it may be. "Kiki and Herb" closes Sept. 10 after a four-week run, although its critical and commercial success almost certainly guarantees it a longer life down the road. Cesa and his co-producers are in talks to tour "Kiki and Herb" to cities across the country and to London and Toronto.

Few are more pleased, except perhaps Cesa's family back home. Fifteen of them attended the opening night of "Kiki and Herb" to show their support. And many were there at an after-party when the early reviews came in. Cesa's mother, Doris Cesa, recalls hearing the show's press agent bolt into that crowd, shouting, "It's a rave! It's a rave review!"

News like this can mean the world to a mother. Especially when she thinks about how hard her son has worked to get here, to Broadway, the pinnacle of American theater.

"I know how hard he struggled," Doris, 73, said last week from her kitchen. "A lot of disappointments."

Her head tilted head down and she stared blankly at the floor, as if speaking of her son's struggles stirred in her a deep ache. "But he always kept a nice attitude," she said.

Cesa's story began in a place that feels far from the flatland of Manhattan. He grew up on a hill in Hawthorne, in the house his parents built while Doris was pregnant with him. His parents still reside here, as does his older brother Wayne, 49, who lives on the second floor with his wife. It is a tight-knit family, so much so that it feels like no one ever truly leaves home.

"If you listen closely," said Wayne, who joined his mother in the kitchen, "you'll hear my brother's footsteps on the kitchen floor, dancing."

The youngest of four brothers, Jamie Cesa splintered off from his siblings when they were younger. His brothers gravitated towards athletics, but Cesa was drawn to acting. "I just really latched on to it," he said.

He started almost as soon as he could stand on two feet.

"Kindergarten, that was Paddington Bear?" Wayne said.

"No, third grade," Doris said.

It was Doris who impressed upon her boys to appreciate movies and fine acting. "My mother didn't tell me bedtime stories. She told me the plots to old movies," Cesa said.

Doris grew up during the golden age of Hollywood and often saw two movies a week. Her mother would take her to Broadway plays when she was a kid. "I saw Angela Lansbury in 'Mame.' Barbra Streisand in 'Funny Girl,'" she said. "I don't need to see Usher in 'Chicago.'"

And when Cesa was a boy, Doris' mother made him a scarecrow outfit so he could wear it to his school play, "The Wizard of Oz." The scarecrow is now Doris' favorite character.

"I can't look at that movie anymore without a tear coming to my eye," she said.

"I like the lion; that's who I like," Wayne said.

Doris recited the line, "I think I'll miss you most of all, Scarecrow."

Sometimes the family speaks to each other only in film dialogue, quoting a line from one movie and responding with another. "No one knows what we're talking about," Doris said.

Just one of those family things.

Doris remembers turning on the soundtrack of "The King and I" and dancing with Jamie, then a boy, in the kitchen. Wayne remembers when Jamie got the family backstage during the 1996 revival of "The King and I," and introduced his daughter Nicole to its star, the '80s movie hunk Lou Diamond Phillips.

"The first time I've seen my daughter swoon," Wayne said.

There were the others the family met: Liza Minnelli, Raquel Welch, Julie Andrews.
"If it weren't for 9/11, we would've seen Tom Selleck," Doris said.

Cesa moved to New York in the early 1990s to train at the William Esper Studio, a respected acting school. But upon graduation, he decided to leave acting altogether. "I enjoyed being a student much more than I did pursuing work," Cesa said. "It is such a precarious business."

Wayne recalled how his brother felt about auditioning and how casting directors seemed more concerned with appearances than skill. "You could stand up there and not say a line and they could say, 'No.'"

And so Cesa looked for work behind the curtain. He trained to become one of theater's invisible hands -- a stage manager, a producer, a person who does everything for a play but few people notice, like raise the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars it takes to put on a single play.

He got his start under the Broadway moguls Barry and Fran Weissler, working on such blockbusters as "Greece" and the touring production of "Victor/Victoria." That led to his first big gig, general managing Liza Minnelli's production, "Not a Well Woman."

"Walking into Duane Reade with Liza Minnelli is an experience everyone should have," Cesa said with a big grin.

Once he struck out on his own, Cesa pursued smaller and more off-beat productions. That suited his tastes better than safe, tourist-friendly fare. "I'm not really that interested in producing revivals of 'Oklahoma,'" he said.

He veered toward punchy and politically barbed works like "Kiki and Herb." His first Off-Broadway production, "The Last Session," was about a man who plans to kill himself after he discovers he has AIDS. It was a musical comedy.

His most enduring production is "Naked Boys Singing," a musical that delivers exactly what the title promises. After seven years straight in New York, "Naked Boys Singing" is now the eighth-longest running Off-Broadway production. There have been 35 productions of it around the world, and the show has been translated into four other languages: Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Norwegian.

He has handled dozens of other productions. But as Cesa discovered, the world of a producer is still filled with insecurity. Critics took the place of casting directors. Lukewarm reviews sank many productions that Cesa deeply believed in. "The Last Session," which had inspired Wayne to start up an AIDS-awareness charity, was one of them.

Cesa musters a strong face in light of these defeats. "You got to accept the casualties and move on to the next one," he said.

He hopes that "Kiki and Herb" can be that next one. Even without it, he still has his family behind him.

Cesa's father, James, suffers from Parkinson's disease and dementia. He hasn't seen one of Cesa's productions since "The Last Session."

He couldn't make it to "Kiki and Herb," either. So Cesa came home instead.

Doris recalled the scene when her baby boy entered the house on a recent Sunday: Her husband sat up, leaned forward and stuck out his hand. He then spoke the words scripted in his heart.

"Congratulations, son," his father said. "I'm proud of you."

A volatile mix of humor

Kiki and who?

Part train-wreck spectacle, part pop culture pun factory, "Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway" is also one of the more unlikely productions to ascend a Broadway stage.

The show, derived from years of nightclub acts and Off-Broadway productions, is a bawdy spoof of lounge-style cabaret. Its titular characters, the lounge-singer Kiki and her piano accompanist Herb, are supposed to be two show-biz wash-ups from the 1950s who cling to the stage despite the fact that time has clearly passed them by and left them hollow shells of drunken despair.

Kiki, played in drag by Justin Bond, is a bit of a Frankenstein concoction: She has Kathleen Turner's voice, Tina Turner's sass and Joan Rivers' face (if Rivers were a man in disguise). As the two-and-a-half hour performance progresses, she drains a jug-handled bottle of Canadian Club whisky and performs exceedingly ridiculous renditions of modern pop songs like Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy."

Herb, on the other hand, played by Kenny Mellman, seems painfully repressed. Gay, Jewish and deemed dumb by the institution he was raised in (Kiki calls him a "gay Jew-tard"), Herb seems chronically on the verge of exploding.

Their volatile mix of grotesque humor has helped "Kiki and Herb" develop a cult following among downtown crowds since it first hit the stage in the early 1990s.

But the show is not for everyone.

"Kiki and Herb" purposely pushes people's political buttons. It giddily takes cat-claw swipes at the Catholic Church, opponents of gay marriage, Mel Gibson and the apathetic state of the anti-war movement. Even the poet Maya Angelou is not spared. "I know why the caged bird sings," Kiki chimes at one point. "Because she can't write."

In one of the more daring scenes, Kiki reminds the mostly silent Herb that while it is illegal to stand onstage and call for the president's assassination, it is perfectly permissible to wish that the president would die on his own.

The crowd at a recent performance particularly loved that line.

Kiki reserves her six cruelest words for a lovely song at the play's end: "Somebody's house/always burns/at Christmas."

It would be painful if it weren't so funny.

"Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway" runs through Sept. 10 at the Helen Hayes Theatre, 240 W. 44th St., in New York. Tickets cost $87.50 and can be purchased by calling Telecharge at 800-432-7250 or visiting www.kikiandherb.com.

-- Ed Beeson