Bill and Hillary, sent up in ribald song

Hillary (Kerry Butler) and her two loves WJ (Tom Galantich and Billy (Duke Lafoon) in “Clinton, the Musical.” (Russ Rowland)
 

By Peter Marks April 10 at 11:22 AM Follow @petermarksdrama

NEW YORK — Depending on what voters have in mind, “Clinton the Musical” is either a flashback to some of the juicier comedy targets of recent presidential history or an early warning about all the seamy jokes that will be restored to the national satirical cycle over the next several years.
If another Clinton administration is indeed in the offing, brace yourself for endless rehashings of the salacious Oval Office follies that “Clinton the Musical” predictably dredges up, revolving around a stained blue dress, special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and “that woman” with whom Bill Clinton famously denied having had sexual relations, Monica Lewinsky.
The 95-minute musical, which had its official opening Thursday night at off-Broadway’s New World Stages, doesn’t offer much in the way of a fresh or incisive take on the Clinton White House years, stretching from 1993 to 2001. The brainchild of a pair of musical-writing Australian brothers, Paul and Michael Hodge, the show was born three years ago at the Edinburgh Fringe. Before its current commercial run, it also was staged in London and at the New York Musical Theatre Festival.
Though it’s bolstered by some first-rate performers — including Broadway’s Kerry Butler, as a voraciously ambitious and eternally frustrated Hillary Clinton — “Clinton the Musical” feels as if it has arrived from some far-off land where news of the Clintons has only recently been received. The Hodges were beaten to most of their punches eons ago by the likes of “Saturday Night Live” and other comedy groups specializing in political lampoon, such as the Capitol Steps.
What “Clinton the Musical” chooses to highlight about its main subjects might, I suppose, be of some use to Clinton partisans, who want to remain informed about what they’re up against in popular memory. The Hodges and their director, Dan Knechtges, conceive of pants-suited Hillary as a political wife dealing with a husband of such monumentally conflicting traits and drives that he has to be portrayed by two actors: Tom Galantich is dignified, poll-conscious WJ (William Jefferson); Duke Lafoon is his bad-boy alter ego, the sax-playing, shades-wearing Billy. (Surprise, surprise: Lafoon is more fun.)

WJ (Tom Galantich), Hillary (Kerry Butler) and Billy (Duke Lafoon), address the press (Veronica JKuehn, Judy Gold and Dale Hensley) as Newt Gingrich (John Treacy Egan, far right) watches in “Clinton, the Musical.” (Russ Rowland/Russ Rowland)

“When your husband’s split in two,” Butler’s Hillary laments in song, “you have to be the Krazy Glue.”
Sex, the Hodges posit, is the root of all politics. To wit, Starr — the erstwhile solicitor general whose investigation of the Clintons’ Whitewater real estate dealings mutated into a probe of the president’s involvement with Lewinsky — is a leather-loving persecutor carnally obsessed with the president. As played for camp by Kevin Zak, Starr is the musical’s whacked-out answer to Inspector Javert. His melodious co-tormentor is Newt Gingrich, the House speaker at the time, embodied by John Treacy Egan as a politician with his own messily self-destructive set of appetites.
The Looney Tunes sensibility Zak and Egan pack into their performances gives the show some zest — and does remind you how much riper the politics of the ’90s were for comedy. The accomplished standup comic Judy Gold is on hand, too, delivering one of the evening’s more devilishly enjoyable turns as Lewinsky confessor Linda Tripp.
Lewinsky, who’s back in the news of late, offering herself up in interviews and speeches as a recovering victim of a nation’s penchant for public shaming, might feel her cause is dealt a setback in “Clinton the Musical”: She’s presented in the person of Veronica J. Kuehn as a dewy dope, star-struck into a misguided belief that she’ll end up forever in Bill’s embrace.
Paul Hodge’s coarse and pedestrian pop score leaves nothing to the imagination on this or any other account. “I’m f------ the f------ president, oh yeah!” Kuehn sings, the kind of witless lyric that might, with more vigilant adult supervision, have been sensibly discarded.

CLINTON THE MUSICAL

Book by Paul Hodge and Michael Hodge, music and lyrics by Paul Hodge. Set, Beowulf Boritt; costumes, David Woolard; lighting, Paul Miller; orchestrations, Neil Douglas Reilly; sound, Peter Fitzgerald. With Kara Guy, Dale Hensley. About 95 minutes. Tickets: $75-$95. At New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St., New York. Visit telecharge.com or call 212-239-6200.