‘The Kosher-Style Mikado’ was too good to retire.

He calls himself Earl the Pearl, or sometimes Oil the Poil. Fifty years ago, Earl Draimin met the composer George Gershwin in Detroit. Gershwin played a couple of Draimin’s songs and liked them.

“Go West,” the composer told the aspiring songwriter. Oil the Poil took the advice.

“He was going to help me when he got out here,” Draimin said. “But he died before he got out here.”

Left on his own, Draimin encountered hardship in the music business, writing songs like “What a Beautiful Thought” that were never recorded.

To get by, Draimin started a notions business. After the war, he settled in Van Nuys and helped build a temple there, Temple Ner Tamid.

There Draimin fell in with another writer named Bernie Weiss, and, together, Draimin and Weiss pioneered their own musical genre, the temple musical. The idea was to take a popular musical, throw in some Yiddish shtick and a joke or two about the sisterhood and then build a chorus of temple members.

First they produced “There’s No Business Like Schul Business.”

Then, Draimin said, his late collaborator fashioned the nom de plume Ginsberg and Solomon. They went to work on a piece that was destined to become tradition.

“The Kosher-Style Mikado” premiered in 1967. It was too good to retire. So, 10 years later, Draimin and Weiss recycled it into their annual temple production.

Another decade has passed and a lot has changed. Weiss is no longer living. Neither is Temple Ner Tamid. In March, 1986, the temple’s aging membership--down to only 220 families and a handful of children--merged with nearby Temple Ner Maarav in Encino.

With them came the Mikado. Its time has come around again. Temple Ner Maarav will stage it Saturday and Sunday nights in the Reseda High School Auditorium.

As a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan’s original Mikado, I found myself drawn to the temple one night last week to watch Draimin’s Oily Carte Opera Co. in rehearsal.

I wouldn’t want to give away too much of the story. But it should be well-enough known already that the two sharp-witted satirists created a colorful illusion of Japanese courtly life to spoof the overweening authority and puffery of nobility as interpreted in 19th-Century England.

What makes The Mikado so enduring, I think, is how that thin pretense of a remote and outdated society extends the spoof to the foibles of all times and places.

The Ginsberg and Solomon version carries the point right into temple by inserting a layer of Yiddish into Japanese courtly life.

As I walked in Tuesday night, a chorus of about 25 temple members, mostly middle-aged and wearing casual clothes, was singing the opening number, “We Are Gentlemen of Japan.”

Only they said: “We are Yiddelach from Japan.”

Draimin, a sprightly 70, sang with them. Then he sat down and began a jaunty commentary on the staging and cast.

“That’s our cantor,” he said pointing out a slender, slightly graying man who was singing “A singer of ballads am I / Been at it since I was knee-high.”

“That’s where he’s got such a good voice,” Draimin said.

The story of the Kosher Mikado is largely faithful to the original, turning on the impatience of the Mikado (the emperor of Japan) with the Lord High Executioner, Ko-Ko, who can’t stand the sight of blood and therefore hasn’t held a single execution even though he keeps a long list of people “who’d just as well be underground.”

Ko-Ko’s list goes like this:

There’s the kid who comes to chadar and is always chewing gum,

With some chocolate in his fist . . . I’ve got him on my list

And the Rabbis giving sermons till your rear end’s growing numb,

They never would be missed, they’d none of them be missed.

To solve his problem, Ko-Ko decides to execute Yanki-Poo (the Kosher Nanki-Poo), a wandering minstrel who has won the love of Yum-Yum, the woman Ko-Ko is to marry.

Yum-Yum, played by a young actress named Rita Silverstein, makes her entrance singing the catchy song, “Three Little Maids from School Are We.” Only she says:

Sweet maid-a-lech from shule are we.

We live our life religiously.

We are as frumm as frumm can be

As you can plainly see.

A glossary will come inside the program to inform the audience that maid-a-lech means maiden and frumm means pious.

Some of the songs don’t need translation. Draimin has left a couple of the Gilbert and Sullivan songs unchanged.

“In some places they were perfect as they were,” he said.

In deference to Gershwin, he has also thrown in several Broadway and jazz tunes.

The villainess, Katisha, who loves Yanki-Poo, sings “Won’t You Come Home Poo Yanki?” to the tune of “Bill Bailey.”

And, as the first act closes, the whole chorus frolics on stage singing, “Be a Clown.”

Choreographer Elinor Levine made them dance it three times Tuesday to get it right.

“This is too good a number to let go to waste like this,” she scolded when the chorus was kind of singing at attention. “Remember, you’re clowns. Anything goes. Even bumping into each other.”

“In a kimono?” someone asked.

Oyf zikher. You should see it.