Davis turns back a page in her career by heading to ‘Chicago’

On a glorious afternoon, Paige Davis steps out of a taxi in front of the Broadway home of the musical “Chicago” with a disposition as sunny as the sky itself.

“Is this not the most perfect day or what?” she asks. “Isn’t it?”

Few people would seem as happy returning to their old job after five years of TV success, but that’s exactly what Davis is doing this summer. And she couldn’t be more pleased.

Davis, the perky — some might say excessively perky — host of cable TV’s top-rated home improvement show, “Trading Spaces,” has returned to “Chicago,” where she once toiled as an understudy.

This time, though, she’s got the one thing that eluded her years ago: the lead role of Roxie.

“It’s a dream come true,” says Davis, 34. “It’s a cliche, but it is.”

What’s less certain is whether “Trading Spaces” fans are ready for their girl-next-door host to don sexy outfits, dance seductively and play an adulterous murderer.

“They don’t know that ‘Trading Spaces’ is the first television I’ve ever done,” she says. “So it should be interesting to have people see a whole different side of me.”

Davis began her career as a dancer with the Beach Boys and appeared as Babette on the national tour of “Beauty of the Beast.” Her resume also includes regional roles in “A Chorus Line,” “Company” and “Hello, Dolly!”

She had no TV experience when a friend suggested she apply for the hosting spot at “Trading Spaces,” the show where two pairs of neighbors agree to remodel one room in each other’s home.

She tried but initially failed. More precisely, she couldn’t even get an audition.

“This will sound terribly egotistical and arrogant, and I don’t really mean to sound that way at all, but I thought: ‘I am a Broadway performer, and I can’t get an audition for TLC?’ ” she says.

Undeterred, Davis left a personal plea on the answering machine of The Learning Channel’s general manager. She was informed that producers would only see her on the last day of auditions — and only if there was time.

“At a certain point, I wasn’t even sure what I was fighting for,” Davis says. “I didn’t even know if I wanted the job any more. I just wanted to prove I could get in the door.”

Now she sometimes finds herself wondering what she got herself into — especially during the more icky projects like ripping up wall-to-wall carpeting.

“There are many times when I’m on set, where I’m involved in a project, where I’m just, ‘That’s it! I hate home improvement! This is just disgusting,’ ” she says.

“But I get so enthusiastic about the things that we work on that I wonder, ‘Well, how I can hate it when I’m so excited to be doing this right now?’ “

While she’s signed up for the upcoming season of “Trading Spaces,” Davis is much more happy transforming a very small space these days: her dressing room.

And if her Broadway castmates knock on her door to see what the home-improvement diva has done with the place, Davis is ready if they’re disappointed.

“I have the built-in excuse that I’m here only seven weeks,” she says with a smile.

The birthday bunch

Conductor Mitch Miller is 93. Advice columnist Abigail Van Buren is 86. Actress Eva Marie Saint is 80. Playwright Neil Simon is 77. Singer Bill Withers is 66. TV personality Geraldo Rivera is 61. Singer John Waite is 49. Singer Stephen “Ste” McNally (BBMak) is 26.