“Mr. Gershwin Goes to Washington” arrives in town at the optimum moment. The adaptation of the three political satires by the Gershwin brothers comes to the Kennedy Center replete with showstoppers sung by stars of Broadway, opera and TV and hosted by an announcer familiar to news junkies. The keyboard accompanists are composer Joseph Thalken and Steven Blier, the artistic director of the New York Festival of Song. The script, by Laurence Maslon, ties words and music together with accuracy.

Composer George Gershwin and his brother, lyricist Ira, were first-generation Americans fascinated by politics and amused by the slapstick characters contrived by Gilbert and Sullivan. The show’s humor was ahead of its 1927 opening, so the team of the Gershwins and dramatist George S. Kaufman put it away for three years until a revision struck all the right chords.