Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt team up for a sparkling show at the equally spiffy Lansdowne Theater

The reopening gala for the Lansdowne Theater featuring Brazilian band and Lansdowne residents Minas isn’t happening until April 10, but the 99-year-old, newly refurbished showplace has been up and running for a while now.

Back in August, Chazz Palminteri brought his one man A Bronx Tale to the Lansdowne, the 1927 Jazz Age movie palace has undergone a $20 million restoration that has brought the 1280 capacity theater back to life in all its Spanish colonial revival architectural glory.

The show of the season took place on Thursday night. Texas tunesmith Lyle Lovett and Hoosier songwriter John Hiatt teamed up for a two-hour plus enchanting evening enlivened by inspired stage patter and song craft that was, by turns, laugh out loud funny and genuinely moving.

Taking their seats on stage shortly before 8 p.m., Lovett, 68, was dapper as always in a tailored blue suit with tie knotted tight. Hiatt, 73, also wore a suit jacket, but just as his rugged songs are more emotionally direct than Lovett’s precise, often darkly comic narratives, he was charmingly rumpled, in jeans nearly worn out at the knee.

The duo took note of the refurbished surroundings at the start. Lovett joked that unlike the Lansdowne, which was shut down for nearly 40 years before its was brought back to life , “we’ve been open that whole time.”

Hiatt agreed, while admitting that after a career that stretches back to 1974’s Hangin’ Around the Observatory and includes such acknowledged classic albums as 1987’s Bring The Family and 1988’s Slow Turning, he sometimes feels like could use some renovations himself.

Lovett and Hiatt have toured together extensively, and Thursday’s show was their final date on a three-week winter run, with no plans at the moment to tour together again.

That gave the night a bittersweet vibe for the two good friends who are a pleasure to watch, in part, because they so clearly enjoy being in each others company.

Between songs, Lovett talked about how playing without a band paid dividends in eliminating the need for a set list. He then pulled out a rare gem in a cover of under-appreciated Lone Star State songwriter David Rodriguez’s “Ballad of the Snow Leopard and Tanqueray Cowboy.”

“I’m not the kind of man with all the answers,” he sang in a song he said Rodriguez taught him when he starting out playing clubs in Houston in the late 1970s. “But I surely know the songs that suit me best.”

He sure does, and he sings them with his own unique style of phrasing that makes rewarding use of the pregnant pause — which he also used to comic effect in conversation. He frequently cracked Hiatt up, particularly with tales of his 8-year-old twins and remembering growing up watching Walter Cronkite on the nightly news.

The conversation took place between tunes with Lovett, who studied journalism at Texas A&M, drawing out Hiatt on his life in music, from teenage band stories to his current songwriting practice.

But it also took place musically, as each songwriter’s selection kindled an idea in the other, with both traveling down to Louisiana, on Lovett’s “One Eyed Fiona” and Hiatt’s “Mississippi Phone Booth” and “Feels Like Rain.”

For all their shared influences in country and blues and folk, Lovett and Hiatt are stylistically opposite in many ways.

Lovett was mostly stationary as he watched Hiatt play and sing, conducting himself with a gentlemanly Southern politeness that comes across even as he picks out pearly notes that rang out clearly in a clean, crisp sound mix.

Hiatt is scruffier, twitchy with nervous energy. He kept time with a jiggling leg while his songs chugged along, sung in a gravelly Indiana bluesman’s voice.

In the second hour, both troubadours got around to the signature songs that the audience of longtime fans came to hear.

Lovett got laughs with “She’s No Lady” and delivered the subtle heartbreak of “Nobody Knows Me” with tenderness. Hiatt rendered the prayerful “Have A Little Faith In Me,” with such soulful sincerity that Lovett suggested a world in which it was the only song in existence would be a fine place to live.

The two veterans worked in tandem with Hiatt adding blues licks to Lovett’s songs, and the two trading lead vocals on “Thing Called Love,” Hiatt’s 1987 song that was a massive hit for Bonnie Raitt two years later.

Politics was never mentioned, but the duo’s decision to close with Woody Guthrie’s left leaning populist “This Land Is Your Land” was a pointed choice.

The crowd sang along to the lyrics they’ve known by heart since grade school, and Lovett made sure to include the collectivist verse that is often edited out of denatured versions:

“There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me, with a signed painted that said, ”Private Property” / But on the back side, it didn’t say nothin’/ That sign was made for you and me.”

The bright and spiffy new Lansdowne has hosted tribute bands and folk and classic rock acts like Shawn Colvin, Marc Cohn and Steve Hackett, and calendar highlights coming up include Graham Nash on April 4, Ani DiFranco and Valerie June on May 6, and Jeffrey Osborne and Will Downing on June 6.

All the shows are being booked by BRE presents, the Haddonfield-based independent promoters who also exclusively book the Scottish Rite Auditorium in Collingwood and Ocean City Music Pier. They also book concerts at area venues like the Keswick Theatre in Glenside and Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville.

The return of the Lansdowne adds a new Delaware County showplace to the list of suburban theaters and venues that exist in a ring around Philadelphia, including the Sellersville Theater in Bucks County and the Grand and Arden Gild Hall in Delaware.

Together, they create a regional market that many veteran artists with older, loyal fans bases — like Richard Thompson and Judy Collins, who are playing Lansdowne in July — can return to again and again. The Lansdowne is a welcome addition.