Winning Ticket

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: OF THEE I SING

AUTHOR: MUSIC BY GEORGE GERSHWIN; LYRICS BY IRA GERSHWIN; BOOK BY GEORGE S. KAUFMAN AND MORRIE RYSKIND

WHERE: ARENA STAGE, WASHINGTON

THE BOTTOM LINE: The first musical ever to win the Pulitzer Prize proves as sharp as when it opened in 1931.

POLITICAL SATIRE IS GENERALLY considered a fool's undertaking in the theater. Indeed, George S. Kaufman, who misfired with the genre a few times, used to say, "Satire is what closes on Saturday night." If satire is pointed enough to be good, it tends to alienate potential customers. It usually grows dated long before recouping its costs. And it must be truly outlandish to exceed reality.

Consider, for example, a presidential race in which the leading candidate tap-dances and croons torch songs, carries on a tabloid affair with a beauty- pageant entrant and has a running mate who is a national joke when he's not a faceless nonentity. This party's winning agenda consists of one word: love. Americans are urged to vote their belief in romance, and overwhelmingly they fall for it.

Ostensibly that's the spoof campaign in Of Thee I Sing, the 1931 Gershwin brothers hit that became the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. But is this joke election so much daffier than the real thing, with one contender playing the saxophone while another spouts platitudes about family values? Is a Vice President whom no one recognizes any more ludicrous than one who fluffs grade-school spelling?

Arena Stage, the leading theater in the nation's capital, plainly doesn't think so. Nor do audiences for its zesty production: they find startling topicality in gibes that weren't born yesterday. Says artistic director Douglas Wager: "Apart from revisiting the librettists' first draft and incorporating some of Ira Gershwin's alternate lyrics, we haven't updated a thing. We haven't had to." The librettists were Morrie Ryskind and, ironically, Kaufman, who despite his woes with satire kept at it anyway. The humor is neither as rich nor as heartfelt as in his You Can't Take It with You, but much of it still sings of us. About the choice of Alexander Throttlebottom as Vice President: "We put a lot of names in a hat. This guy lost." A Senator warning fellow hacks that the voters "love," "respect" and "honor" their party, but "they do not trust our party." A vow from the platform: "We appeal to your hearts, not your intelligence."

Visually, the production blends an authentic '30s Art Deco look with wry hints of updating. Wager was lucky in being able to cast John P. Wintergreen, the vacuous presidential nominee, with actor Gary Beach, who bears a more than casual resemblance to the young Ronald Reagan. There is also an eerie familiarity to the Supreme Court Justices as depicted in giant caricature masks (one is black and another female, emphatically not reality in 1931), and an oblique gay inflection has been wrung out of one bit of dialogue. But most of the performers make no headline reference -- the dim Vice President is plump and scruffy, not boyishly cute -- and the big production numbers feel almost antique.

Arena was not alone in spotting the timeliness of Of Thee I Sing. Five other troupes, including the eminent Cleveland Play House and the feistily avant- garde Remains Theater in Chicago, have scheduled it this year. But there is a special sizzle to seeing this quintessential Washington show with a Washington audience, which laughs with a self-critical edge at the judgment onstage that corn muffins are more important than justice, or at the rueful line, "I kind of hoped to have a nice clean campaign -- without any mention of an issue."