Shouts of "We love you, Joni!" periodically erupted through the cabaret at the Westbeth Theater Center during a recent performance of "Paved Paradise," John Kelly's alternately worshipful and uproarious tribute to Joni Mitchell. Mr. Kelly, a 42-year-old performance artist, has been doing impersonations of the flaxen-haired folk-pop diva for more than a decade. But "Paved Paradise," which plays at the theater through Saturday (151 Bank Street, West Village) is a full 90-minute show in which he sings more a dozen songs by the queen of confessional singer songwriters.

Although Mr. Kelly dons a blond wig and wears overlaying granny dresses to impersonate the star in her post-hippie folk-singing days, "Paved Paradise" is less a drag act than a surreal hommage. Mr. Kelly is accompanied on keyboard and guitar by musicians done up as crude comic caricatures of two of Ms. Mitchell's muses, Georgia O'Keeffe (Zecca) and Vincent van Gogh (Mark McCarron, wearing a garish plastic ear patch).

To perform Ms. Mitchell's anthem "Woodstock," whose lyric is expanded to mention Wigstock, the New York City cross-dressing festival in which he has participated, Mr. Kelly puts on a ridiculous, oversize bonnet of painted sunflowers. "The Circle Game" is illustrated by the Dadaist image of a stuffed chicken whirling on a turntable.

Only someone who has absorbed every nuance of every Joni Mitchell recording could have come up with a vocal caricature as lovingly devastating as Mr. Kelly's. In song after song, he exaggerates her wide, wobbly vibrato, shading it into a shrill police-siren yodel that is at once laughable and eerily compelling.

All the songs in the show, which takes its name from lyrics from "Big Yellow Taxi," except one ("Night Ride Home"), are at least 20 years old, but the years haven't diminished their edgy emotional urgency. Mr. Kelly brought an especially piercing fervor to "Shadows and Light," "Blue," "Down to You" and "Amelia" that revealed these dense, introspective reflections as art songs seething with exquisitely concentrated song-poetry.