Are you ready for "Saddam: The Musical"?

The Iraqui National Theater is beginning production on "Zabiba and the King", a musical touted as the country’s largest ever theatrical production. This mother of all musicals was allegedly penned by none other than dictator Saddam Hussein.

When I read this news, I experienced the same reaction that you’re probably undergoing right now: "this is a joke, right? Is this some Middle Eastern version of April Fool’s Day?"

But it’s all true. As always, the hardest part of satire is staying ahead of reality. It’s been reported by the reputable Reuters news service, quoting state-run papers out of Iraq, a country not known for wacky satire. Not content with having a successful career as a brutal thug, strongman, and chemical weapons entrepreneur, Saddam has apparently been bitten by the theater bug.

"Zabiba and the King" tells the heartwarming tale of a king whose lover is raped on January 19^th—the date in 1991 on which the American-led Coalition forces began kicking the royal snot out of Iraq. In the end, the king captures the rapists, avenges Zabiba’s honor, and dies. There’s also a lot of subplot about who’s going to replace him.

Okay, "Cats" it’s not. I’d tell Saddam not to quit his day job, but then I remembered what his day job is.

Apparently, this is some sort of allegory, or as the Iraqi press reported, "An epic teaching to love one's homeland despite all danger.'' How these people keep a straight face is beyond me. I don’t know that I’d be able to write something like that, even at gunpoint, without giving myself a brain hemorrhage.

What I can’t understand is: why a musical? Maybe the Republican Guard decided that the whole Legion of the Evil Dictator thing had just gotten, so, like, 1990’s, and decided to transform themselves into a chorus line. I can just see it now: "Oh-KAY, people! Let’s do it AGAIN! And this time, kick those Kurds like you MEAN it!"

Now is our chance. We can step up and put that murdering SOB on the ropes for good. All we need to do is form a battalion of New York’s bitchiest, most fiendishly vicious theater critics. We secretly infiltrate them into Baghdad for opening night. Then we bury him in bad reviews. He’ll be so crushed that he’ll be no trouble at all for a good fifteen or twenty minutes.

Then again, he might nuke Kuwait. You ever can tell with theater people. They’re kind of unstable.

Come to think of it, imagine what might have happened if Hitler, a failed painter, had been allowed to have a one-man show at the Berlin Art Museum? Or if Charlie Manson had been able to realize his dream of becoming a rock star? I bet things would have turned out pretty different.

So here’s the alternate plan: we give Saddam a big contract to produce "Zabiba and the King" on Broadway. (To avoid possible confusion and copyright lawsuits from the folks who made "Anna and the King", we’d probably have to change the American title to "Zabiba!") We pay off a few critics to rave over it. We sign Hussein up to executive-produce the movie version, starring Jennifer Lopez as Zabiba and Mark Wahlberg as the King. We spin this out into a three-picture deal with Dreamworks. We move Saddam out to a house in the Hollywood Hills where we ply him with starlets, hot-tubs, Dom Perignon and cocaine. We encourage him to write his autobiography, which he then flogs on "Oprah" and "Larry King. " Oprah and Larry, of course, fawn all over him.

Pretty soon, the man Bush the Elder once compared to Hitler is just another bloated show-biz gasbag, in and out of rehab, rendered annoying but basically irrelevant by his own exaggerated sense of self-importance. I mean, if we can avoid another conflagration in the Middle East, we’re willing to put up with a few bad movies, right? Even if one of them is, say, "Ishtar 2"?

Don’t feel like you have to answer right away.

COPYRIGHT 2001 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.