The View From K Street Steak

Yowsa. A lot of the political satire went over my head, and I only caught brief glimpses of story in the references to the "Inner Loop," but the attitude of the show, written by Walt Stepp, is the type of nightclub amateur hour that's too irrepressible to hate. John and Al, a ventriloquist act (played by Brad Thomason and the perky, hyperactive Samantha Wynn) serve as the interlocutors for the evening, in etween old-school Jerry Lewis humor, they pull open the curtain onto exaggerated "insider" scenes at a bipartisan retreat. The vignettes are all short and rough, but a few make valid, coherent points: "Mimeo" deals with getting a senator out of the closet in private so that it doesn't hurt the party in public, "Snake" says the things about the God Lobby that everyone else is too terrified to mention, and "Take a Number" looks at the real story of competitive bidding. Politics is an act, and K Street does well to dress it up as such, but Tom Herman needs to tighten the technical cues, the cast's tendency for killing the jokes with their own exuberance, and the slipshod feel of it all if he wants this production to really stand up and be something more than a repetitious diversion.