Trading 'Spaces' for Broadway role

She'll return for the upcoming season, but for now, she's back onstage.
NEW YORK (AP) -- 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 even 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," she says. "It's a clich & eacute;, but it is."
Her story is a modern twist on the legend of the starlet plucked from the chorus line and thrust into the spotlight. In Davis' case, the path back to "Chicago" was littered with glue guns, linoleum and fabric swatches.
"She was destined to come back at some point," says Bernard Dotson, dance captain of "Chicago," who has worked with Davis for 14 years. "Coming back and coming back as a celebrity is a huge thing for her."
Fan reactions
What is uncertain is whether "Trading Spaces" fans -- the ones who eagerly tune into The Learning Channel during prime time -- are ready for their girl next door host to don sexy outfits, dance seductively and play an adulterous murderer.
Davis, 34, has only one clue: While her TV show was on hiatus last year, she stepped into a touring production of the explicit "The Vagina Monologues" in Sarasota, Fla. Some initial eyebrows were raised.
"Just to hear me curse garnered giggles. You know, 'Paige Davis said [expletive]! Does she even know how to say that?'" Davis says. "I think people might be surprised that I even do theater at all.
"I also wonder about the snickers that might happen when someone reads the newspaper ad and they think, 'A home improvement host? What's Broadway coming to?'" she says.
"They don't know that 'Trading Spaces' is the first television I've ever done. So it should be interesting to have people see a whole different side of me."
Wearing flip-flops, a green denim skirt with a frayed edge and a baby-doll green sleeveless T-shirt, Davis in person is as upbeat and unassuming as the woman she portrays on TV.
Or could that be just a guise for a more ruthless, clawing careerist? Is she more akin to Roxie, the Cook County Jail inmate who has killed her husband, framed her boyfriend and sings "I'm gonna be a celebrity"?
"I'm both," Davis says. "I have all of that within me. In terms of Roxie, I definitely have selfishness, I definitely have blond ambition. At times I have neediness; at times my ego is beyond belief; at times I'm frightened out of my mind."
Background
Davis, who graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, began her career as a dancer with the Beach Boys and the role of Babette on the national tour of "Beauty of the Beast." Her r & eacute;sum & eacute; includes regional roles in "A Chorus Line," "Company" and "Hello, Dolly!"
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