STAGE REVIEW : A LEHRER PASTICHE WITH PUNCH

Playwright Fernando Arrabal, fascinated by calculus, once said that he could write a play by mathematical equation. I’m not sure he did, or if it applies to writing songs (though music is all math), but mathematician Tom Lehrer, with or without his slide rule, has created some punchy ones.

A good many can be heard at South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage where “Tomfoolery,” a six-person pastiche of Lehrer’s oeuvre is bouncing off the walls, reminding us that topical wit and satire, even the benign wit and satire Lehrer delivers, are always good for an evening’s entertainment.

The songs we hear date back to the ‘60s with no visible sign of attrition. Lehrer, 58 (“He prefers to think of himself as 13 Celsius”), now teaches half the year at UC Santa Cruz. He hasn’t tackled the performance circuit since the late ‘50s and is mostly represented by “Tomfoolery,” a sort of cabaret anthology of his songs, affectionately put together by Cameron Mackintosh and Robin Ray.

(Another production of it is playing an open-ended run at the Burbage Theatre in West Los Angeles and seems to be enjoying the sort of “enormous limited popularity” jocularly attributed in this show to Lehrer’s heyday.)

Some of the subjects he tackles are no longer new: pollution, new math (“So simple only a child can do it”), the bomb (“Japan will have its own device, transistorized at half the price”). But they were very new when the songs were written more than 20 years ago, which shows how far ahead of his time he was--or how stuck in the same unsolved problems we still are.

Some of his other subjects are merely timeless, made special by Lehrer’s delightfully skewed angle of vision, such as “Wild West” (“Where the scenery’s attractive and the air is radioactive”) and even a song called “I Got It From Agnes” which opens up to possibilities not even dreamed of when Lehrer wrote the song.

He is especially adept at good-humored self-derision and at knocking the center out of romantic traditions and notions.

“Christmas Carol,” for instance, is about the credit cards of Christmas. “My Home Town” starts as a paean to memories that turns to describing the monsters and freaks who inhabit the dear old streets.

“National Brotherhood Week” covers the gamut of hatred we bear everyone who’s not exactly like us, while “I Hold Your Hand in Mine” refers to a hand with no body attached and “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” is self-explanatory.

Sounds violent? Not at all. Lehrer’s songs are the product of his cognitive eye, the expression of a good-natured man joyfully enslaved by candor, who may have served as inspiration for that latter-day satirist, Randy Newman. Both men write with similar irreverence about the most sacred cows. And whether Lehrer’s math background has anything to do with his music, it makes him incapable of a nonscanning rhyme.

He fairly revels in the possibilities of language, chewing on syllables (as in that ode to plagiarizing, “Nicolai Ivanovitch Lobachevsky”) or creating such monumental tongue-twisters as “The Elements” (a mile-a-minute reading of chemical and other elements ending in “um,” including “those new ones--linoleum and condominium and two of my personal favorites, Librium and Valium”).

No one escapes. Mozart, Mahler, Oedipus, S&M;, pornography (“Smut, give me nothing but . . .”), they all get it. The church gets it too, in “Vatican Rag” (“teaching an old dogma new tricks”), World War II, “which produced many hit songs even though it was not primarily a musical” gets it in “Wernher Von Braun” and even World War III--in “So Long, Mom (I’m off to drop the bomb),” the song the next generation of boys will sing when they march off to fight it.

Best of all, the South Coast company veterans have put this show together and done it very well. John-David Keller (who also performs and personally tackles the “Elements” song) has directed with unlabored inventiveness and gets splendid support from his friends: Martha McFarland, Diane King (who doubles at the piano and as musical director), Richard Doyle and John Ellington, with Bob Efford bringing in the rear as company bassist.

The spirit of true ensemble moves them and the fun they have together quickly infects the audience, gently but surely lifting collective hearts and tickling collective minds.

Diane Doyle created some simple but satisfying choreography and Charles Tomlinson provided the spare, streamlined set, with good lighting by Donna Ruzika.

Performances at 655 Old Town Road in Costa Mesa run through June 29 (714-957-4033).