George S. Kaufman famously opined that satire is what closes on Saturday night — but if he'd lived to see The Musical of Musicals: The Musical!, he'd have sung a different tune. This captivating evening of five miniature parodies is still running happily and healthily off-Broadway (20 months and counting). And it's spawning other productions, like the one now at the Prince Music Theater.

Rightly so. While most of Broadway's new musicals seem simultaneously overblown and impoverished, MOM proves that all you really need is four actor/singers, one onstage piano and a touch of creative genius.

The recipe for MOM is slyly simple. Take an archetypal story (heroine who can't pay the rent vs. leering landlord ready to, er, collect) and set it as five miniature musicals. Each little show parodies a different model — Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Herman, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Kander and Ebb.

If the idea is basic, the execution is dazzling. Music (by Eric Rockwell) and especially lyrics (by Joanne Bogart) are amazingly on-the-money, finding ways to invoke the requisite style while sending it up — often at the same moment. Take the opening of "Corn," our mini-R&H show. Big Willy, our shiny lug of a cowboy, strolls onto the plains and into a serenade:

Farmin' the land is the life for me

I'm in love with a wonderful hoe.

And we're off and running. "Corn" manages to capture perfectly the optimistic-yet-somehow-creepy R&H tone. (Musical aficionados will also note an embedded reference in the lyric above — these are signature features of MOM, and one of the great delights of the show is trying to keep track of them.) Next up is Sondheim, who has been parodied before — but rarely so deftly. "A Little Complex" begins, "Irony. Ambiguity. Dissonace. Angst," and continues with sublimely Sondheimian silliness:

Finders can be weepers

Some don't.

And here too are those wonderful puns. (Maiden: "Why, Jitter, show a little decorum." Landlord: "A funny thing happened on the way to decorum.") The Jerry Herman/Lloyd Webber/Kander and Ebb tributes are just as funny — and so is the Fosse Lite choreography of director Pamela Hunt.

The Prince has assembled an excellent company, almost as accomplished as the New York original (which is saying something — Bogart and Rockwell not only wrote the show but starred in it!). MOM is probably not a show for novices, depending as it does on knowledge of the various styles. On the other hand, it's a field day for fans, who can turn the evening into a party game.