FROM SLEEPING ON A PARK BENCH TO BROADWAY!

When Broadway star Terri White performs her show-stopper "Necessity" every night in "Finian's Rainbow," she knows what she's singing about.
A year ago, she was homeless and sleeping on a bench in Washington Square Park - and, but for a beat cop who cared, she might still be there.

White, who sings out lines like "the landlord says the rent ain't paid" in front of 1,700 people at the St. James Theatre, couldn't share her troubles with Liza Minnelli, for whom she has sung backup at Radio City Music Hall.

She couldn't tell Glenn Close or Jim Dale, her co-stars in "Barnum," or even her friends at the piano bars in Greenwich Village.

Some of those bars have closed, like Eighty-Eights and Rose's Turn. Most of the others just ain't what they used to be.

"People wanted 'American Idol,' " White, 61, says. "They wanted '80s pop. My stuff is musical theater, torch songs . . . you tell a story. I don't do vocal trickery."

No. No ego fireworks here. Just eruptions from a great soul, in powerful, raspy bursts that tell you this lady knows the blues.

Things got really bad last year. White couldn't pay the bills. Her partner of 14 years threw her out. She couldn't get a gig.

"I can't tell you how many times I auditioned," White says. "Chicago" rejected her eight times.

"I was depressed, and it zapped my positive energy, and I think they felt that," White explains. "I thought I was over."

She was on the street. Guys who'd bummed smokes off her outside the clubs watched out for her. Still, it was dangerous.

She would catnap on a Washington Square Park bench for an hour, then wander the narrow streets of the Village for another.

On one of those walks down Grove St., she bumped into 6th Precinct cop David Taylor.

"I was on patrol at around 4 in the morning. It was early fall, and it was chilly," Taylor says.

"I was coming up Grove and I saw her coming down Seventh Ave. South. She came over to the car."

They'd seen each other around the neighborhood for a couple of years.

"I first met Terri in 2006 when I was on foot patrol. She was immediately friendly and called out, 'Hello, Officer! Thank you for protecting the Village!'

"I'd pop in to the clubs. She has a really booming, powerful voice. She was always smiling and happy."

That's how Taylor knew something was very wrong. "That life force which had always been inside her was gone," he recalls.

White opened up to him in a way she couldn't to Liza.

"Speaking softly, she told me she was homeless. It caused a little bit of panic in me, because the park had a lot of drug dealers."

She'd been on the streets three months. Rather than refer her to a shelter and drive on, Taylor, started calling in some chits.

"I started texting immediately. I had just helped this guy move stuff out of a basement apartment. I asked him if Terri could use a room until she got on her feet. He said okay."

His action set off others, like one magnet clicking to the next.

White started to get her old self back. The owner of The Keys club in Key West, Fla., flew her down to sing for a weekend. It turned into a two-week gig.

She met jewelry designer Donna Barnett. When auditions began for the Encore's version of "Finian's Rainbow," Barnett paid for her to fly to New York.

She got it! Producer Alan Marks heard her sing and hired her for the Broadway show.

Now there's Tony buzz. People magazine. TV. Then White and Barnett fell in love, and two weeks ago they exchanged rings on the St. James stage with White's never-give-up motto of perseverance: "Just Go!"

Taylor, who has the giant kind of soul that makes New York great, was there, beaming.

How's that for a happy ending?