Revel Alliance Carrie Fisher talks about a life that’s far, far away.

If nothing else, Carrie Fisher is the absolute master of the well-timed, withering “-ish.”

You know, the casual take-back, the offhand slight—as when, speaking of one of her father’s several post-Debbie Reynolds wives, the eternally recovering Princess Leia remarks, “Marie was an actress...-ish.”

She’s tried that one out at a cocktail party or three, Fisher has, and she’s fond enough of the trick to deploy it once or twice more in her unrepentantly wicked solo show, Wishful Drinking.

Sure, it’s basically a stroll down memory lane, but in Fisher’s neighborhood, that boulevard is the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And given the tabloid-fodder detours her life has taken, retracing her wobbly steps—with the lady herself providing profane, pointed commentary, in the manner of some louche museum docent—turns out to be entertaining as all hell.

Fisher’s long been known as a sharp writer—those carefully selected “-ish” bombs are as judiciously dropped as any stand-up comic’s signature trope, and their detonations, like many another zinger as the night goes on, set the Lincoln Theater rocking with delighted laughter.

And the material her own history supplies is choice stuff. Movie-star mom! Ditched by pop-idol dad! For Liz Taylor! Plus global stardom at a tender age and a troubled marriage to another huge star! It could drive a person crazy—or at least to pills, booze, weed, and beyond, which is where Fisher goes, cheerfully and sardonically and with just enough eye-rolling to let you know she thinks it’s all a bit rococo, too.

For an evening in a 1,200-seat house, headlined by an actress whose face is instantly recognizable across the inhabited continents, it all feels surprisingly cozy, like you’ve dropped in for a visit with the slightly mad neighbor who used to get the good table at Spago. Alexander V. Nichols’ inviting sitting-room set helps, of course, but Fisher’s manner is most of the magic. She’ll drop a punch line with a kind of no-fuss casualness, perhaps while rummaging in her bag for a cigarette. “I was tempted to marry him, just so I could tell people how we’d met,” she says of the flirtatious ER doctor who once pumped her stomach. Or, about her tempestuous marriage to Paul Simon: “He wrote another song about me, called ‘Allergies.’”

The evening’s unquestioned high point is a merciless mock-genealogical excursion into the excesses of her parents’ marriages—Hollywood Inbreeding 101, Fisher calls the segment, which comes complete with a chalkboard flow chart.

But she saves her best jaundice for herself: “I was invited to go to a mental hospital” is how she introduces her struggle with bipolar disorder—a struggle that seems to have stripped away anything like self-pity, leaving behind something like an essential Carrie Fisher.

So wry is her way with an anecdote—and so low-key her sense of sturdy survivorhood—that you’ll almost feel slighted at not having made the list with her.

Fisher’s solo show isn’t the only flashy, star-studded name-dropper in town: Signature Theatre opened an expensive-looking new musical last week, with New York theater notables onstage and visions of Broadway dancing in its handsomely coiffed head.

And as you may have heard, the paper of record has turned up its nose in a big way: “With some judicious trims,” wrote The Washington Post’s lead critic, “the aviation-themed Ace might be a candidate for long-term showcasing at a venue such as the Air and Space Museum.”

Meeeow.

But don’t despair, if you’ve already plunked down your nonrefundable $86 for that Friday-night seat: It’s not quite that lame.

Not that it’s ready for prime time, exactly. What it is: overstuffed, and largely nonsensical, if stylishly packaged.

Surly, 10-year-old Danny (Dalton Harrod) winds up in a foster home after his mother (Jill Paice) attempts suicide. For reasons that remain stubbornly unclear, Mom’s effort to win the kid back revolves—in the face of urgent entreaties from Florence Lacey’s worried social worker—around a kind of historical scavenger hunt in which model airplanes, old diary entries, and sundry newspaper clippings reveal, piece by tidily chronological piece, the stories of the boy’s long-missing fighter-pilot father (Matthew Scott), the courtship that brought Mom and Dad first bliss and then heartbreak, and the grandparents (Christiane Noll, Jim Stanek) whose influence set the crash-and-burn course for everything that would follow.

As if the hide-a-clue device—and the two generations of territory it covers—weren’t enough, Ace is also concerned with charting the history of U.S. military aviation and with honoring its heroes, both men and machine. (Thus, you see, the title. And the Air and Space Museum crack. And the “overstuffed.”)

Still, the tunes are agreeable (if a bit same-same), and the performers largely first-rate. Paice, whose wan grief in Act 1 gives way to a winning vivaciousness after intermission, summons a scorching rage later still, when the plot (somehow convoluted and predictable all at once) demands it.

And Angelina Kelly, as a pigtailed playground detective who helps Danny parse the riddles Mom keeps parceling up and shipping over to the foster home, hooks the audience in the early going—and reels ‘em in, gasping with delight, with a saucy showstopper of a solo called “Now I’m on Your Case.”

Robert Perdziola’s costumes upholster the show’s three major eras—the two World Wars, plus the early 1950s—in an easy-to-decode visual vocabulary, while Walt Spangler’s efficient steel set, with a substantial assist from Michael Clark’s precisely calibrated projections, suggests cockpits and barrooms, classrooms and bedrooms and leafy campuses with surprising grace.

All that style, all that skill, and mostly for naught: Ace keeps trying to soar, but all the ground clutter keeps it firmly earthbound.