Back during the Milwaukee Rep’s 2010-11 season, the company showcased the world premiere of "Liberace!," a glance into the life of the Milwaukee-born musical sensation. For star Jack Forbes Wilson and writer-director Brent Hazelton, however, one go-around was nowhere near enough time to capture such a larger than life figure.

"Anytime you do a new play, you never finish it the first time around," Hazelton noted. "You always want another shot at it to really adopt all the things you learned the first time around."

So, once again, it’s time to step back in front of the candelabra for "Liberace!", which begins its second run at the Rep’s Stackner Cabaret on Friday, Nov. 7. The sequined, shimmering capes are back, as well as Wilson’s modest secret rehearsal weapon possibly even more important to the success of the show: superglue.

"When I practice a lot, the tips of my fingers would get sore, so I learned that superglue is a great way to keep my fingernails from splitting," Wilson noted. "It’s like super duper nail polish for the very tips."

For the show’s second staging, Hazelton and Wilson changed a bit from its original production. A couple of songs have been switched out or added in a new place. The classical music emphasis from the first run has been given a brief Latin injection, and a rendition of "Malaguena" – a number Hazelton wasn’t quite able to convince Wilson to add the first time around – has been introduced to the script. The bigger thing, however, is returning to a character, full and rich with life, with a new sense of familiarity and calm.

"It was a lot more relaxed this time," Wilson said. "We were still writing the play on the first day of rehearsal, and to some extent, we’re still writing the play. Little, tiny things. I’m still very nervous about it, but we’re not chewing our fingernails. The character is also more relaxed than I was. Just the rehearsal process sort of infused him with a childlike quality that I liked. But he was always extremely comfortable in front of an audience. And if there’s any reason that he comes back, I need to feel that again."

For Wilson, it’s a new sense of ease for a surprisingly demanding on-stage character. Since it’s a one-man show, Wilson is saddled with more lines than Hamlet – in addition to singing songs and playing the piano up to the level of a musical phenom – plus the fascinating complications of "Mr. Showmanship," including his persona’s sexuality, overtly yet also ambiguously pushing the boundaries of the accepted norms of the period while maintaining his position as a pop culture phenomenon.

"His behavior on stage was overtly gay, I think, but he never acknowledged that in terms of his actual sexuality," Wilson noted.

"He always figured out where the line was, walked right up to it, said, ‘This is the line! We’re talking about the line!" and then would back off from it before revealing anything real about that," Hazelton added. "He made fun of himself. He made a giant caricature of himself, told everyone it was a caricature of himself, made fun of the caricature of himself and encouraged everyone else to do that too. When you’re that reflexively self-effacing, it just puts everyone in the room at ease. You don’t care after that."

The creation of a persona, and the battle between that persona and one’s stage identity, is one of the crucial points of conflict in "Liberace!", with the performer trying to balance his true humanity with the outsized creation the world knew him as.

"It’s the life of the real dude, not the life of the sequins guy, but the sequins guy was certainly important to the life of the real guy," Hazelton said. "He played a character for the last 30 years of his career, and that character is hugely important in his life. It’s the way I think 95 percent of the people in the world who still remember him remember him as his character, not as who he actually was – who was 12 or 15 layers down by the end of his life."

In a way, Liberace and his mix of gender roles, sexualities and personas would end up serving as a precursor to the pop culture to come. Hazelton noted the renowned showman helped lead the way for the collision of sexual and gender identities scattered across ’80s culture, with hair bands for instance mixing lace gloves and big, done-up hair with motorcycle boots and womanizing lyrics.

Even now, his impenetrable self-made web of private life and public celebrity rings more true than ever during a time when camera phones and social media gives every person on Earth – celebrity or not – a stage to hone and harness the identity of their choosing. Hazelton joked Liberace probably would’ve loved Facebook, another outlet for his rapidly growing, all-consuming persona.

"For me, this production quickly became a metaphor for identity and what happens when the world tells us we have to hide parts of ourselves from the world," Hazelton noted. "What damage does that do to us? What damage does that do to the people around us? It’s a really real conversation that every human being has to deal with on a regular basis. How hard is it to carry that persona for an increasingly large portion of your life. That’s sort of where we see Liberace wind up in the last years of his life. It was all character, all the time, and that’s hard work."

Whether for his role in pop culture or merely for his skill as a pianist and performer, for both Wilson and Hazelton, Liberace is a crucial part of pop cultural history – one who was mostly dismissed, brushed aside and forgotten soon after his death from AIDS in 1987. However, thanks to Steven Soderbergh’s recent HBO TV movie "Behind the Candelabra," the piano prodigy and pop cultural fascination has received a revival. Hazelton gives it credit for resuscitating public thought about Liberace, but otherwise seemed unimpressed ("It’s OK," he shrugged).

"We’re telling fundamentally different stories," Hazelton said. "That is a life biopic thing, but you don’t ever get any sense in there for what it was like to be at one of his performances or what he was really like as a performer. That’s the thing that we’re able to offer: actually putting you in the room with a guy playing the piano."

"‘Behind the Candelabra’ is a great metaphor for that show, because you don’t see that much of the stage," Wilson added. "What we’re doing is ‘In Front of the Candelabra’ and how everything that happened in front of the candelabra is what we see. So we have to try to make you imagine what happened behind the candelabra, and maybe that’s more interesting than having the camera there in the bedroom."