STAGE REVIEW : Political Barbs From Gross National Product

Gross National Product offers bite-size bits of political comedy--without much bite. Just in time for the primaries, the D.C.-based group has been joined by some local comedy luminaries, at the Odyssey Theatre.

John Roarke repeats his peerless Ronald Reagan impression, which was seen at the Odyssey in “Rap Master Ronnie” in 1985, when it mattered. Now, with Reagan out of office, it’s featured in only one of the show’s couple dozen sketches.

Roarke’s Bill Clinton isn’t nearly as sharp as his Reagan. He doesn’t have the accent down, and Roarke’s physiognomy is much closer to Reagan than to Clinton.

John Simmons does a fairly accurate George Bush. Early photos distributed to the press showed Doug Cox looking remarkably like Jerry Brown, but now director Simmons, not Cox, plays Brown in the show’s one brief Brown bit.

Still, Cox got the biggest laughs at the performance I saw. They were in “Electronic Candidate Message,” a “personalized” video addressed to a man in the audience by a generic candidate, who spews out fill-in-the-blanks information about the man, as gleaned in a pre-sketch interview. It’s a clever commentary on the impersonality of “personal” political pitches.

Most of the sketches fly by without leaving many tracks. Not that anyone wants the less successful pieces to drag on and on. But the absence of a more sustained piece of satire leaves a once-over-lightly impression, almost like the 30-second newscast that’s parodied here.

Locally, there’s a wicked glance at the Rodney G. King incident from the perspective of the cops, who paint themselves as oh-so-caring as they invite an unseen King (represented only by monster-like sounds) to indulge in the Corinthian leather of the back seat of their car. But there is barely a mention of the aftermath of the King verdict. While it’s surely difficult to treat riots from a satirical perspective, the absence of any such attempt leaves a big gap.

Perhaps because men are still more prominent in politics, the men here are more prominent than the women. But Ritamarie Kelly does an amusing take as Cher singing about Sonny’s latest venture, Marianne Curan serves as a pitch woman for a First Lady school, and the two do a sketch in which a doctor in a federally financed clinic resorts to charades to tell a patient about abortion.

* “Gross National Product,” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West L.A., Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Indefinitely. $15. (310) 477-2055. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.