Miss Abigail wants everyone to achieve the love she shared with her late husband, and she’s willing to impart her knowledge, right down to the correct lip position for the perfect kiss.

If you are attending “Miss Abigail’s Guide to Dating, Mating & Marriage” at CLO Cabaret, there are a couple of requirements for her how-to seminar, including references to romance through the ages:

Be prepared to participate and, most of all, laugh.

Paige Davis, the host of TV’s “Trading Spaces” and a star of “Chicago” and “Boeing Boeing” on Broadway, portrays Miss Abigail, alongside Javier Manente as her sexy assistant, Paco.

“Miss Abigail is a hopeless romantic, and she wants everyone to experience the deep beautiful love that she got to experience with her husband,” Ms. Davis said. “That is what sent her on this mission, to spread the idea of love to the world. She’s like the moral version of ‘Sweet Charity.’ ”

In devoting herself to others, Miss Abigail appears to have forgotten the happiness of just one person — herself. She’s also the woman who helped to mend Paco’s broken heart, and now he is thrilled to help her help others.

“He has such admiration for her,” said Mr. Manente, who arrived here from Argentina in 2012 to attend Point Park University. “He just loves her, and he thinks what she is doing is amazing.”

Mr. Manente has recently been seen in Pittsburgh Musical Theater productions of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “Dreamgirls” and previously played Juan in CLO Cabaret’s “Altar Boyz.”

With Paco and Juan, he will have played two Latino characters in books by Ken Davenport.

“I don’t want to be pigeonholed — ‘Oh, Javier always does the Latin-American guy’ — but I love doing Latin-American characters,” he said. “I have that in me, and I can just bring so much to it.”

Mr. Manente said he is focused on making sure Paco is different than the character of Juan, but Ms. Davis has some advice for her co-star.

“I just want him to be the best Paco he can be,” she said, seated beside him during a break in rehearsal.

“On the first day I said to him, ‘You are already great.’ His energy, his aura, everything about Javier is so likable. Everyone is going to want to take him home. The women are going to want to marry him; couples are going to want to adopt him … He’s so infectious. I think the audiences are going to fall in love with him.”

Paco gets a head start charming patrons, greeting them and making sure the mood is right for Miss Abigail to work her magic.

A game audience is the show’s third character and can help make time fly during a long-running production. “Miss Abigail” continues through Aug. 14, which suits the actors both from a business and personal standpoint.

After Point Park, Mr. Manente headed to New York and booked some shows upstate before returning for the PMT musicals and auditions with Pittsburgh CLO.

“I love Pittsburgh,” Mr. Manente said. “I moved here when I was 18, and it was the perfect change for me. The city where I am from is a mid-size city, and moving here was the step I needed before New York. Pittsburgh is a cultural, sporty, gorgeous city.”

For Ms. Davis, the show is a homecoming of sorts. She will be staying with her mother and stepfather, who moved to Pittsburgh when she left for college. She also was here in December, when her husband, Patrick Page, starred as Scrooge in Pittsburgh CLO’s “A Musical Christmas Carol.” That’s when the CLO associate producing director Lori Berger introduced the idea of her playing Miss Abigail.

She is happy to return to the company that gave her the role of Maria in “The Sound of Music” in 2005.

“They treat their actors really well. They have respect for the process and do quality productions, and it’s kind of hard to say no to Lori Berger — she’s so nice,” Ms. Davis said.

Pittsburgh was another draw. She has visited other cities around the country and called the support of the arts here “remarkable.”

“The fact that I will have seen three shows before we even open and knowing that all that is going on is really exciting,” she said.

The actors hope to add to the excitement with the introduction of “Miss Abigail’s Guide to Dating, Mating & Marriage.”

“It’s light, it’s fun, and it’s about living in the moment,” Ms. Davis said. “It’s a wonderful date night, and it’s very funny.”

“We talk about things we all do in real life,” added Mr. Manente. “Everyone will relate.”

Sharon Eberson: seberson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1960. Twitter: @SEberson_pg.

First Published: May 10, 2017, 4:00 a.m.