" Goodness had nothin’ to do with it, " famously replied Mae West when told her Diamond Lil sparklers looked good. Goodness, however, has a lot to do with Dirty Blonde, Claudia Shear’s Tony-nominated play about West and two kindhearted present-day losers who bond over their obsession with the leering, voluptuous, artificially platinum-crowned legend. Shear’s play supplies a jaunty glimpse of vaudeville, a thumbnail biography of a fascinatingly determined woman, not one but two Mae West impersonators, and a humane little tale of love and tolerance. There’s even a moment of drumroll-worthy self-invention that, albeit on a smaller scale, recalls Carol Channing’s glittering-red-clad descent into the Harmonia Gardens in Hello, Dolly!

Dirty Blonde, a surprise hit in which its author starred on Broadway, is seen here in its New England premiere, with the reliable Maryann Zschau and a revelatory Larry Coen playing tug-of-war over West’s wig and corset. Zschau’s Jo, a struggling actress " when not an office temp, " meets Coen’s Charlie, who works in the film archives of the New York Public Library and actually visited West during her grotesquely glamorous Hollywood dotage, at West’s mausoleum at Cypress Hills cemetery. The two strike up a friendship, trading such quotable West innuendo as " I make things stand that never had no feet. " Gradually, as Jo puzzles over Charlie’s sexual orientation and the two pay shared homage to " the movie-star equivalent of Venice " (in that there’s nothing even remotely like her), they discover a touch of Venice in themselves and in each other. It’s all very sweet and might be treacly except that the sweetness is set against such vintage camp and sleaze, and eventually, both characters, like the West of the 1930s honing her old-fashioned if smut-talking hourglass self, get to be Mae.

In Shear’s cleverly feathered work, Jo and Charlie, in matching trenchcoats, talk to the audience as well as to each other about why they love Mae West, amid flashbacks to the bawdy icon’s career in which Zschau plays the wiggling, censor-beleaguered vaudevillean who became a star. In addition, there are snappy musical numbers (including the title song), with Will McGarrahan, the third member of the ensemble, playing honky-tonky piano, and re-creations of the shy yet determined Charlie’s awed courtship of the octogenarian West, who’s holed up in Hollywood’s Ravenswood Apartments like a cross between Diamond Lil and Miss Havisham.

The play is pretty irresistible, though at the Lyric it doesn’t command immediate surrender since Zschau, with her narrow countenance, resists visual transformation into the hippy, round-faced, sexually swaggering young West. She does affect an audacious persona and a tight-lipped, zingy West delivery, however, as she presents the self-sold showboating pioneer who spiced up her act, and riled up the law, with non-stop wiggles and multiple entendre. And once McGarrahan, as queenly West chum Edward Eisner, helps transform the star into the cinched and behatted, " curvy and nervy " persona that clicked for her ( " she found what worked and she froze it " ), even Zschau seems magically transformed.

More important, Spiro Veloudos’s production succeeds at being both light and poignant, thanks in large part to Coen’s noble turn as burly West acolyte and sick-of-being-nice guy Charlie. A veteran of Beau Jest who is also a playwright and a director, Coen presents a dignified, disarmingly candid Charlie who appreciates but is not cowed by the irony of his situation and doesn’t do a half-bad job of the Mae West walk ( " like a football player with hips " ). McGarrahan, too, when not jazzily banging the ivories, presents a collection of colorful, slightly seedy characters, among them a smoking-jacketed Eisner and retired vaudevillean Joe Frisco, the amanuensis of West’s latter years.

As the man-shy Jo, Zschau provides a natural tomboyish contrast to the character’s ribald idol. And oddball though the relationship between Jo and Charlie may be, Zschau and Coen make it plausible and tender. Mae West, whose sexuality was notoriously straightforward, probably wouldn’t understand it, but it’s doubtful she’d object to being the center of any sandwich.