Lucie Arnaz is a Broadway baby

“I have never in my life performed for an audience that was so crazy good,” Lucie Arnaz says. “That room” — by which she means the Paramount at the Crown & Anchor in Provincetown — “was the best sound and lights we had anywhere on our tour.” That might be overstating it a bit, but even on the Outer Cape, flattery will get you everywhere.

Arnaz’s upcoming gig is called “I Got the Job: Songs from My Musical Past,” and she is ready for it. “My dad [Desi Arnaz] suggested I do this 40 years ago. Hello, I had only done two musicals, so it would have been 11 numbers from ‘Cabaret’ and ‘Once upon a Mattress.’ That would be it,” she says. “Years went by. We were getting ready to put together a whole new show for this summer. I mentioned it to my music director of 30 years, Ron Able. He kind of rolled his eyes. I said, ‘Here’s a list of all the shows I’m talking about. Let’s go online and look at all the shows I’ve done and combine it with memories of having done them and why.’ Now that I’ve put it all together and we’re in rehearsal, I want to slap myself. Who wrote this show? There are 11 11 o’clock numbers in a row.”

It’s difficult to keep your voice healthy when you’re on tour doing back-to-back performances. Arnaz tries to sing correctly, which involves knowing when to breathe. She is going to a lot of places, where she has friends who say, “Let’s have lunch together, dinner?”

“I’ve had to say no. I really have to pace myself. I’m just going to be a little convent girl this summer,” she says.

Arnaz likes being in front of a live audience. There are conditions, however. When she was a small kid she couldn’t get in front of people even in her living room. “But if I could make a little makeshift stage and put a light on it, then I could make magic happen,” she says. “I always knew what it was, but I didn’t know it was called theater.”

Her first audition was for “Cabaret” at San Bernardino Light Opera in Riverside, Calif. She was doing the “Here’s Lucy” show at the time, and Vivian Vance, her favorite aunt, said, “What do you do when you’re not doing the show?”

“Oh, we go to Mexico or Hawaii,” Arnaz says. To which Vance responded: “No no no no no no no. You’ve always wanted to be onstage. You picked your high school because it had a theater department. When you’re not doing TV, get your ass back to the theater. You don’t want to get stuck on having a television series the rest of your life.”

It was an unexpected rebuke, considering Vance’s decades on the tube. “What was she talking about?” Arnaz says. “Then I thought, I hear what you’re saying, because Viv was an actress who could sing. She did drama, she did comedy. When they found her, she was doing ‘Voice of the Turtle.’ She could do dramatic stuff. She could do ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ Suddenly, she was doing ‘I Love Lucy’ and she couldn’t go back to shows, because she was too well known as Ethel Mertz. I took that to heart and started auditioning.”

Arnaz is the daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. That fact alone certainly opened doors that weren’t available to most people. Her name may have gotten her an audition, but it was what she did in that audition that would get her the part. It’s not about what you’ve been given — it’s what you do with these opportunities that make all the difference in the world.

When her mother had wanted to cast her on “Here’s Lucy,” initially, Arnaz said no.

“I wanted to do this the right way,” she says. “I want to go to Northwestern and be a theater major. I don’t want people to say, ‘You’re on the show because you’re her daughter.’ ”

Both of her parents wanted her and her brother to be on the show. Her mother said, “Well, why don’t you just not worry about that. Try it for a while, and if you’re still serious about going to Northwestern, you can go.”

“I said to her, ‘If you hear the word that the kids are just so-so, we don’t know what they are doing on the show — and you’ll know that soon enough — you’ll have to write me off immediately. Send Kim Carter off to boarding school. I want out. But if the reviews are that they are pretty cute, then OK. I just don’t want to be embarrassed,” Arnaz says.

Her mother said, “Well, I know you can do it. I’ve been watching you.” Ball was the one who had had a small stage built for Arnaz in their backyard as a Christmas present.

“I said yes, and I’m glad that I did it,” Arnaz says. “It was six years of incredible work. I forgot to go to college. I went on to musicals, and then I was on the road in the national company of ‘Seesaw,’ and then I was on Broadway [“They’re Playing Our Song”], and then more shows which you’ll be hearing about at the Paramount. My curriculum was different, and it was the one I was supposed to do.”

What: Lucie Arnaz, “I Got the Job: Songs from My Musical Past”

When: 8:30 pm Monday

Where: Crown & Anchor, 247 Commercial St., Provincetown

Admission: $50-$90 at onlyatthecrown.com

The endless audition