"People wish that they could be like me, but they need a Yale degree and a fake GED," Bush, played by Matthew Jordan Kyle, boasts. "I'll show 'em all when I'm re-elected. What's my hood?"

"Connecticut!" Powell responds.

"No, you mean Texas!"

The show, which runs Fridays through Sundays to Aug. 31, is less than charitable to the commander-in-chief, portrayed alternately as a regressed man-child and a pompous frat boy, but always with an animalistic cunning for understanding how the gears of government are greased.

Perhaps it's why the lion's share of Iraq War, The Musical doesn't take place in Iraq. Writer, director and producer Paul Cross instead follows his take on behind-the-scenes planning, intelligence flubs and backroom deals that got us where we are today, and packs the script with plenty of question-raising tidbits

"The first thing I want to do is entertain and the second is to inform," Cross said. "There's so much stuff about this war that people really don't know about."

Much of the send-up includes familiar tropes like Tony Blair as the effete, eager-to-please lapdog of the Bush administration and the president himself as an empty suit, controlled by a cartoonish, supervillainous Dick Cheney. But the play also digs deeper. In a scene with Osama bin Laden and George Bush the elder, Bush recalls being at a Carlyle Group meeting with bin Laden half brother Shafig bin Laden on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

"Awkward!" bin Laden says, laughing it off.

Without a doubt, Iraq War, The Musical can be pinned down somewhere left-of-center. But surprisingly, perhaps, the play hasn't irked right-leaners and those who supported the decision to go to war as much as one might think.

"My family's very conservative," said Webster Pennington, who plays Colin Powell. "My father is very pro-war. He's not very happy how things have gone. He really enjoyed the performance and recommends it to all his Republican friends -- that there's a lot of good information in it. Of course, when I got in the car and got home I got a lecture about how he thinks things are, but he really enjoyed it."

Kyle agreed. "If you're willing to laugh at Bush and Blair playing with dolls together, that takes you out of your political realm," he said.

Those transcendent moments are when Iraq War, the Musical is at its strongest, like when God, played by Sam Tallent with as much John Wayne as Yahweh, advises Bush in his time of need and explains the nature of the trinity to him and Jesus: "We are literally the same dude."

Powell scores big laughs, too, in his presentation to the United Nations. After resorting to unilateralism, he punches out the UN delegate to Uzbekistan, just to prove a point.

If the whole thing seems flippant about a topic that's deadly serious, you'd be right.

"It's very much a laugh-or-cry scenario," said Galloway Allbright, who plays Tony Blair, the elder Bush and Jesus. "The way we're talking about it is very typical of the way they've had us talking about it -- that it's one or the other, Democrat or Republican. We take silly swipes that may come off as partisan, but the really good stuff is the satire of things that offend everybody, regardless of their political background."

Iraq War, The Musical runs 8 p.m. every Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. every Sunday through Aug. 31. Tickets are $20. For more information, go to www.iraqwarthemusical.com.