Remember the geeky, gawky high school shows you sat through to support your pals who were in the cast, making their debut acting steps in “Grease,” “Our Town,” or “Sound of Music”?

Your motivation was clear: An hour away from class, a chance to laugh, weep or clap at the proceedings in the auditorium with your fellow students and/or parents, and -- if you were thoughtful -- a pinprick of insight into why you weren’t picked for the plum lead.

“Clinton the Musical” [sic, no comma] is slightly better than that, being on a NYc stage, with professional musicians and singers and all. But only barely.

Part of the trouble is that we go to the theatre, especially one eponymously titled as this one is, with a wellspring of tolerance. Most of the audience is, therefore, pretty much tourists in the Apple, determined to take in a play -- preferably a musical, not to tax the grey matter too much, after–all-we-are-on -- vacation--along with their pop into the Met, maybe an elevator to the Empire State Observatory (Gee, they do look like ants, Mom!), a whizz around Rock center, and a shopping blitz including chinatown’s obliviously commendable ethnicity.

But with a play called “clinton,” etc., we get not a straight Show me why I should like you, but a syndrome psychologists call confirmation bias. You can choose from 40-plus shows on the Great White Way. If the one you select is about the (in)famous and interminably ruckus-inflected Clintons, you’re already prepped to like the subject matter.

Also, tickets are a bargain $39, which for Broadway is rock-bottom easy on the Velcro.

The more telling annoyance is the mounting of this musical at this time, a not-subtle sales effort: Rah Rah Shrillary, earnestly hogging the oxygen everywhere out of reporters’ mic-reach. And despite the endless misbehaviors, scandals and peccadilloes, the possible putative First Dude. Does going to this thing constitute a contribution in kind to her campaign?

So the premise is triply tough sledding. At least half the country does not pray at that particular altar. 

But then, the miscasting is embarrassing.

cast as Hillary, vaguely Ms. Rodham circa 16 years ago, in Dc, is Kerry Butler. She’s pretty. Very slim. In her late 20s. Though of course togged out in that heinous medium-blue iconic pantsuit. Butler is fast on her feet, doesn’t shuffle or trudge onstage, and is nothing at all like the original template from which one supposes the director or someone took his or her cue. She doesn’t sound the least bit like her namesake. She has none of the trademark Shrillary vocal tropisms. Butler sings well enough, but the discerning ear hears no Chicago, no Yale, no overcareful enunciations, no anything Rodhamesque. She’s entirely fabricated.

Youngish ‘Billy,’ played by a chestnut-haired skeevy horndog by Duke Lafoon, acts out all over the women onstage.  Tom Galantich plays William Jefferson Clinton, whom we are supposed to understand is the wise and restrained elder statesman. The two Bill Clintons, so Hillary can act against each with faux exasperation.

Newt Gingrich is played by a porcine sloven (John Treacy Egan) barely above a farm animal, chowing crudely on slop and a figure of immense mockery onstage. Ken Starr, he of impeachment over perjury fame, is played as a bizarre secretly transvestite figure, clearly the villain of the piece (Kevin Zak) -- though he is the only one who wrested actual laughs from us, in “A star is born” amusing barn-raiser.

Worst, via the casting director’s misuse of history, is the actress chosen to play Eleanor Roosevelt. Judy Gold as Hillary’s muse. She brays in arch, ugly parody, and sweeps onstage as a giant, horsy figure in abysmal costumery and plumy hats. Gold, a terrific comedian and writer on her own, is a gangly, imposing 6’3” tall. Eleanor R was 5’11” -- certainly tall for her time, and tall for her husband, a mere 5’10”… standing. But this excellent humanist of deep respect is reduced to ridiculous travesty here.

A parade of too-hectic historic figures skip-steps across the stage at repeated intervals, singing and yukking it up about hilarious things like the Whitewater scandal, which the onstage characters think is just a phrase without meaning or significance. On dances Monica (Veronica j. Kuehn), in her trademark beret, a huge rose of white ‘stain’ on her blue dress.  Cue brief indicated dalliance with the younger Billy. On leers the demonic Ken Starr. Ha ha.

One hilarious element is the figure of Al Gore, who is pulled onstage occasionally by one character or another, a life-size cardboard cutout. That hit a funny, since his wooden personality is nicely caught in tall cardboard.

The play strip-mines the trajectory of clinton sordidity for laughs and curdling entertainment. But that lode has been over-sucked. That lode is…a different kind of load.   

But hey, if you want to visit it twice, “repeat offenders” -- their term -- get a second ticket for only $20.

Rush. Don’t let this one slip away.