Joey Curatolo, foreground, sings and plays the bass as Paul McCartney in the Beatles tribute band Rain.

Joan Marcus

Joey Curatolo has been portraying Paul McCartney onstage since the 1976 Beatlefest, when some friends entered him in a Paul sound-alike contest without his knowledge. He won it, and a year later was in the cast of the Broadway and touring show “Beatlemania.”

In 1982 he left, and in 1983 he took the role of Paul in the new Beatles tribute act Rain. And he’s been there ever since.

“It’s so satisfying to turn on two more generations to some of the greatest music ever written and recorded,” he said in a recent phone conversation.

The show traces the career of The Beatles “from Ed Sullivan to Abbey Road,” as the group puts it, and Curatolo calls the three tenets of the show “interpretation, application and endurance. … We approach this music like classical musicians approach Beethoven and Mozart.”

You can hear more than a little of Curatolo’s native Brooklyn in his voice, and he acknowledges that he plays bass right-handed, in contrast to McCartney. But a quick listen to some YouTube clips and his vocal resemblance to McCartney is remarkable. As for being a righty, he says, “It’s about the music first.” He tried playing left-handed for a while, but he couldn’t play up to the standard he needed to hit.

“I’d rather the music sounded like it than looked like it. And I get a lot of flak for it. But five minutes into the show you’re not worried about whether I’m left-handed.”

It’s a symbol of what Rain is about, he says.

“ ‘Beatlemania’ ran its course, and at the time it was hiring people [based more on whether] they looked like The Beatles than on what they could actually sing and play. Don’t get me wrong; there were some characters in the show that were brilliant” — at one point, all the members of Rain have been in Beatlemania — “but this is the all-star cast. And we felt as though we were truer to the music.”

Curatolo says the key is in the vocals.

“There are Beatle bands that travel with a whole string section and everything, but if you don’t sound like Paul McCartney, if you don’t sound like John Lennon, you don’t sound like The Beatles. You have to have the inflections. And the musicality has to be there.”

Rain travels with one auxiliary musician handling keyboards and synthesizers, thus, ironically, allowing the tribute act the opportunity to do studio masterpieces that the real Fab Four weren’t able to reproduce live. “It’s great, and today’s technology enables you to get closer and closer than ever.”

The show includes set and costume changes to reflect the progress of time and The Beatles’ career, starting with a re-creation of “The Ed Sullivan Show,” including a Shea Stadium tribute, an acoustic set of White Album-era hits such as “Rocky Raccoon,” “Mother Nature’s Son” and “Blackbird,” and ending with the tear-in-the-eye flourishes of “Let It Be” and “Hey Jude.” It’s a complicated, densely packed show, and Curatolo says that the chemistry is important: This lineup of Rain has been together 11 years.

“We know each other’s moves, and it’s a very tight production. I liken it to some of these Broadway productions that have been running for years that are classic shows. They all have markers; they all have lighting cues. [But] we work the bells and whistles around the music, and we take the music very, very seriously. And we’re always learning.”

And while you might think playing Paul for 30 years would get stultifying, Curatolo says it’s gratifying.

“To look out into the audience and see a 16-year-old who knows all the words and wearing the ‘Let It Be’ shirt and having the same love and affection for the music as I did at that age a generation ago — I don’t know how you explain that; it just tells you that this music will never die.”

Rain plays at the Providence Performing Arts Center, 220 Weybosset St., Providence, Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 1 and 6:30. Tickets range from $33 to $60; call (401) 421-2787.

rmassimo@projo.com