'This Is the Week': Brilliant, high-energy, terrific

Could any election year be riper for satire than this one? Or is the roundelay of insults and clownishness that characterizes the 2016 presidential campaign already so extreme that it resists parody?

This Is the Week That Is: The Election Special, 1812 Productions' annual political sketch comedy, meets the challenge head-on, and with panache. Smartly directed by producing artistic director Jennifer Childs, the show offers a rich brew of song parodies, running gags, audience participation, and incisive, often hilarious impressions.

It all makes for a brilliant, high-energy evening, written and performed by a stellar cast and benefiting from the ingenuity of Jillian Keys' costumes and Jorge Cousineau's video projections. Childs herself kills in the role of Hillary Clinton, cabaret singer and party girl. In "After Hours with Hillary," she riffs on the Frank Sinatra classic "That's Life" ("I've been loved and labeled, Lewinski-ed and loathed . . . ") and "I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" from the musical Dreamgirls.

Then she welcomes a motley crew of halfhearted backers that includes Joe Biden (the irrepressible Justin Jain), Elizabeth Warren (Sean Close, in drag), and Tim Kaine (Nia-Samara Benjamin, also in drag). Dave Jadico ably impersonates a saxophone-playing, intern-loving Bill Clinton, promising to be "a great first ladies' man" and to convert the situation room into a man cave.

Best of all is Alex Bechtel, the show's musical director, nailing a mincing, pivoting, orange-haired, portly, and, of course, monomaniacal Donald Trump. Singing an all-too-appropriate version of the Sammy Davis hit "I've Gotta Be Me," he declares: "Whether I'm right or whether I'm wrong. . . . But I'm always right, and I'm never wrong."

One could easily imagine Bechtel (and other ensemble members) on the stage of Saturday Night Live, a show to which This Is the Week That Is is heavily indebted.

The first act ends with two smashing numbers. The Von Trump Singers - Trump's dirndl-and-lederhosen-clad progeny - take on "So Long, Farewell" from The Sound of Music before being fired. Then Bechtel's greaser Trump and Childs' Clinton pair up for a wistful parody of Summer Nights, recalling the bygone pleasures of summer stumping.

The second act, less laser-focused on presidential politics, doesn't quite reach those heights. An Olympics sketch (starring Jains as a Second Amendment enthusiast of such new sports as "pommel gun"), a "Lady Business" sketch attacking all things phallic, and a long news segment, with Close at the anchor desk, could benefit from trims. Childs adds satirical heft with her signature turn as a South Philadelphia woman, Patsy, who compares Trump to scrapple: "Even if you love it, deep down you kind of know it's disgusting."

Overall, it's a terrific night - one that will evolve with the headlines. At intermission, a woman confided that she found the campaign itself terrifying, not funny. This Is the Week That Is is an apt tonic for those preelection jitters.