Well, at the very least, President Harding's wife is a rock star.

The powerhouse vocals of Richelle Howie as Florence Harding are a highlight of Landless Theater's lively but uneven production of the musical President Harding Is a Rock Star, an ironic tribute to a man widely considered one of the worst presidents in American history. And while Ms. Harding may well have been the force that got the incompetent Warren through two years of the presidency before his death, Howie just about successfully carries the weight of this show on her shoulders.

The play was first performed by the experimental troupe Les Freres Corbusier in 2003, the company who brought us another rock revisionist history piece, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which premiered in L.A. earlier this year and is slated to hit New York next year. That show made tapped into the energy of an MTV generation hungry for an authentic hero, and used shock value with hilarious results, as when Jackson and his wife, in goth teen fashion, bathe in each other's blood to celebrate their love. President Harding...isn't quite so poignant.

The work makes the thematic point of underscoring how easily power corrupts, and how an attractive but ultimately shallow man can ascend to the highest office in the land because people like him. But it doesn't go much further than that. Its jokes rooted in history are frequently amusing (take any riff on the excessive pride Harding takes from the tariffs he passed), the work doesn't feel grounded in much more research than a look at Harding's Wikipedia entry. Setting the play to rock music, though, helps keeps things feeling spirited, and makes a rather bland biography (after all, this is the guy who won an election on the theme of "a return to normalcy") much more palatable, and at just over an hour, even with its faults, the show zooms along nicely.

The weakness of a Landless production often lies in its inconsistency. In President Harding, the cast boasts more dynamos than detractors, but discrepancies still remain. As the title character, Andrew Lloyd Baughman inhabits kind of a Jack Black-style frenetic charisma; his backup singers Katie Molinaro and Karissa Swanigan strike the right note of jazzy adulation. But scenes with Jen Tonon as a cliche Napoleon and Esther Covington as a dubious Alexander Hamilton kill the show's pulsing vibe (the work doesn't help matters by throwing in a gratuitous coke sniffing scene). Luckily, there's always a monstrous giant crab around the corner to keep things interesting.

President Harding Is A Rock Star runs through Nov. 30 at DCAC. Tickets are available online.