Suzanne Somers starts her one-woman show “The Blonde in the Thunderbird” provocatively. The question she poses, “Would you make the same choices if you had life to live over again?” takes a back seat to the outfit she asks it in, though – we haven’t seen a wide black belt, leotard bottom, and sparkly flesh-colored tights like this since the 1980s.

Hips cha-chaing to the beat of her backup band, Ms. Somers struts across the front of the stage. When she tells us her age (58), she stops, vamps, and waits for the wave of riotous applause. She gets it. Suzanne Somers has become the ultimate saleswoman- even her body is a sales pitch.

Whether or not you choose to buy what she’s selling relies on your tolerance for stories that “overcome the odds.” For some, the threshold is high: On leaving the theater, many audience members were vocal in their praise for her “truth.” “She’s not asking for our pity,” admired one woman. Well, true. But she is asking for our cash. A certain level of honesty about the hard facts of her life – particularly her alcoholic father, a tendency for lying and bad checks, and a long-term relationship with a married man – has over time turned into a means of advertisement.

The show, written and directed by Ken and Mitzie Welch, could itself be an extended QVC special. The husband-and-wife team has produced a string of Carol Burnett specials and boasts 16 Emmys between them. Opening with a photomontage, they give us the television-on-stage vibe right away.

Two large screens project constant close-ups of Ms. Somers – when not showing a constant barrage of TV Guide covers and giddy pinup poses. Clearly, Ms. Somers’s relationship with her fans is so closely related to the small screen (25 hours this month on the Home Shopping Network!), even her live show must be boob-tubed.

The best parts of the show are three clips played on those overhead screens. One, a Johnny Carson appearance, proves that his wry touch could make even the most vapid guest seem interesting. Another shows us Phil Donahue in a gloriously unglossy light. But the third, the teeny fragment of “American Graffiti” that brought Ms. Somers into the mainstream (and gives her show its title), is the gateway to Dada.

Ms. Somers, grateful beyond words to George Lucas for this “big break” (she had no lines, and was simply listed as “blonde in T-bird”) sings “How Do I Say I Love You?” to an absent George Lucas. Leaving out for the moment the toy white Thunderbird she drives briefly around the set, this is a moment of perverse weirdness of the sort only Broadway can offer.

The rest of Ms. Somers’s 95-minute self-help promo focuses on her struggle for self-esteem. When she wrote “Keeping Secrets” in the late 1980s, many hailed her for exposing the pain of alcoholics’ adult children. Unmasking ugly facts about her family helped de-stigmatize the condition – she advocated therapy and honesty and the cold, clear light of day. But decades of re-churning her old pain have turned even this impressive feat into cheese.

When Suzanne relives a wretched experience with her father, she looks, pensively, to the floor. We see her trademark flaxen hair sweep across her face (in close-up, of course), while a male voice-over yells “You’re worthless! You’re a zero!” That voice will recur, when Ms. Somers realizes she shops out of self-hatred and when her lover, Alan Hamel, tells her he’s married.

Every possible setback has been reimagined as a positive, or at least a book deal. Ms. Somers has beaten cancer? Read about her hormone therapy and laud her tenaciousness. Even a horrible accident, when her son is nearly crushed to death by a car, turns out to be a “blessing” because it introduces Suzanne to her therapist.

The climactic song, delivered over the phone to her shrink, confesses “I love my nose! I love my thoughts! I love my hair!” Something galls about this narcissism – surely the purpose of psychiatry isn’t simply to make Suzanne Somers feel good about her hips.

But Ms. Somers isn’t a powerhouse on QVC for nothing; she knows how to sell even this clunky show. She makes an audience applaud her for having a relationship with Mr. Hamel for 37 years, despite the fact that for the first 10, he was cheating on his wife. She turns her scandalous departure from “Three’s Company” into a crusade for women’s lib, though every other account paints her behavior on the show as ludicrous.

But the loudest, longest ovation of the night comes when she hoists her trademark Thighmaster triumphantly over her head. It puts a new spin on “commercial success.”

Until September 3 (56 W. 47th Street, 212-307-4100).