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Frank Loesser didn't make the cut. "So universal, he was hard to parody." Lerner & Loewe didn't make the cut. "So similar to Rodgers & Hammerstein." Nor did Kurt Weill. "Had to compete with Kander & Ebb." Cole Porter and many others didn't make the cut.

The people who made the cut — "the Mount Rushmore of musical-theatre composers and lyricists," Rockwell and Bogart call them — are Rodgers & Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Herman, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Kander & Ebb. Rockwell and Bogart are Eric Rockwell, composer, and Joanne Bogart, lyricist (book writers both), and the parade of parodies they've woven together, The Musical of Musicals: The Musical!, was such an Off-Broadway smash twice already that it's back among us for the third time.

"We're calling this the re-re-re-opening," says Rockwell of the show at Dodger Stages that begins R&H-wise: "Oh, what beautiful corn/What beautiful, beautiful corn/The wind whispers secrets, the field is all ears/Oh, what beautiful corn!" Lyricist Bogart plays and sings various aunts and frauleins all named Abby; composer Rockwell, at the piano, sings and plays various heavies demanding the rent — or, alternatively, her fair body — from a young woman variously named June, Junie or Juanita, all played and sung by Lovette George; and Craig Fols plays and sings the big dumb hayseed(s) whose devotion saves the hapless ingenue from a fate worse than rent or death.

"I was writing material for my stand-up," says he, "when Joanne said, 'Why don't you write a show for me?' I said, 'You're very funny, why don't you write it yourself?' So she did."

He was already a member of the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop, started by the late Lehman Engel; she joined it forthwith, writing and performing an audition song ŕ la Rodgers & Hammerstein: "Walk on through the wind and trudge through the rain/Though your hair's all blown and you look insane/And your eye makeup's running and your nose is red/The hills are alive but you're half-dead!/Follow your dream!/Chin up! Belly high!"

"The whole show really came out of that one song," says he. "Then we were on our way," says she. The BMI Workshop became a testing ground like the out-of-town Broadway tryouts of yore. They were a huge York Theatre hit in 2003 and 2004. One last question: Have you chaps always been able to pay the rent? "Yes," says he. "As an actor, over all these years, a little dicey," says she. "But I always came through." Belly high!