When it opened on Broadway nine days after the September 11 attacks, Urinetown was my new favorite musical. It had emerged downtown from the New York International Fringe Festival (in which I had participated), aggressively mocking song-and-dance tropes to deliver a bleakly satirical message about society and the environment that boiled down to: “We’re fucked.” Looking back a quarter-century, as the show returns for a limited run with City Center Encores!, I find myself asking: Did I love Urinetown before I actually liked musicals? Was I too ignorant of the joys of the genre to temper my transgressive glee?
It’s possible, but my ambivalence is also related to the jokey limitations of the material, and this underwhelming incarnation. In terms of musical comedy, Urinetown may feel outsider-ish, but it has a lineage: the sick yuks of Little Shop of Horrors, the anti-establishment quirk of Anyone Can Whistle, and the neo-Brechtian hectoring of The Cradle Will Rock. Half the score sounds like it was traced on Kurt Weill sheet music, with composer Mark Hollman adding gospel, Disney, and Leonard Bernstein to the pastiche bowl. Book writer and co-lyricist Greg Kotis crafts what is essentially an evening-length sketch on the political and ecological fragility of civilization. Not many shows end with the narrator shouting, “Hail, Malthus!”—a nod to the philosopher who theorized that war, famine, and disease are necessary calamities to curb overpopulation. (Imagine the cast of Sweeney Todd getting Darwin Awards at final bow.)
The setting is an unnamed city in a future time when water is so scarce, private toilets have been outlawed. To relieve themselves, citizens must queue up and pay to answer nature’s call (set designer Clint Ramos creates a modular suite of port-a-potties amid catwalks and scaffolding). The city government, fully bought by the CEO of Urine Good Company, Caldwell B. Cladwell (Rainn Wilson), constantly raises pee fees, fleecing the poor to line their own pockets. Our hero is Bobby Strong (Jordan Fisher), a stout-hearted lad who works at Public Amenity #9, where one fateful day his penniless father (Kevin Cahoon) whizzes on the street, unable to control his senior bladder. Faster than you can spray-paint “ACAB,” Officer Lockstock (Greg Hildreth) hustles the coot to “Urinetown,” a euphemism for…well, as Lockstock assures us, we’ll find out in Act II. Bobby gets radicalized, falls in love with Cladwell’s daughter, and a very silly revolution ensues.
Kotis’s book is filled with meta gags, as Lockstock—often accompanied by street urchin Little Sally (Pearl Scarlett Gold)—walks us through the story, making sure we never forget how ridiculous musicals are:
LOCKSTOCK
Whoa, there, Little Sally. Not all at once. They’ll hear more about the water shortage in the next scene.
LITTLE SALLY
Oh. I guess you don’t want to overload them with too much exposition, huh.
LOCKSTOCK
Everything in its time, Little Sally. You’re too young to understand it now, but nothing can kill a show like too much exposition.
LITTLE SALLY
How about bad subject matter?
This stuff is genuinely funny—it had me rolling in the aisles when I was 31—but after the twelfth self-referential joke, it starts to wear thin. Hollman’s music and lyrics are undeniably skillful and witty but compared to a more polished (and brutal) satire such as The Book of Mormon, the soundalike tunes can start to cloy. Granted, the stronger Act II features “Snuff That Girl” and “Run, Freedom, Run!” two terrific comic showcases for the ensemble and choreographer Matye Natalio. The former is a jazzy descendent of Bernstein’s “Cool” and the latter is a white-folks-writing-gospel number, a barnburner in spite of itself.
One thing’s for sure: Urinetown isn’t dated. Oligarchs so despicable we’d shoot them dead? Guarantee you someone is writing a musical for Luigi Mangione. Mindless masses easily swayed by bread and circus? Check. Cops killing citizens? Evergreen. Oh, and climate change? We don’t talk about that anymore. All the more regrettable that the City Center production, with director Teddy Bergman’s tentative comic attack, a cast of uneven vocal power, and not enough musical verve from conductor Mary-Mitchell Campbell, left me wondering if the material was that strong in the first place.
The unforgettable Broadway production set the bar too high. Jeff McCarthy’s strapping, daddy-knows-best Lockstock didn’t pretend to be in on the joke; partnered with Spencer Kayden’s subversively sweet Little Sally, he shifted gears expertly from goofy to gallows. Here, the framing device wobbles. I admire Greg Hildreth’s dignified-clown shtick; if you ever need a hobo who quotes Kirkegaard, Hildreth is your man. But he lacks menace and a rich enough baritone. And the choice to cast an actual tween as Little Sally was a misstep. Gold is talented, but her deadpan line readings and limp stage presence drains energy from Sally’s appearances. As the ruthless Cladwell, Rainn Wilson levels up Dwight Schrute’s libertarian mania amusingly enough. Stephanie Styles does excellent work as Cladwell’s perky, idealistic daughter, Hope, a classic squeaky ingénue. She also can sing, a precious resource in this revival. As a pervy, corrupt senator named Fipp, Josh Breckenridge steals his scenes with goony aplomb which probably cracked up many a rehearsal.
I wanted to love Urinetown all over again in a golden spray of nostalgia. My disappointment comes down to scale and razzmatazz. The show began more or less as a punk stunt, a blatantly anticommercial Off-Off musical with ironic jazz hands. It took a risk on Broadway, had a strong 965-show run, and won Tony Awards (including Best Book and Score). For its ghoulish giddiness to work, you need either no-budget grunge to foreground the cynical rage, or big-budget showbiz values to achieve tension between style and content. What’s on at City Center falls unsteadily between, neither #1 nor #2.
Urinetown | 2hrs 20mins. One intermission. | New York City Center | 155 West 55th Street | 212-581-1212 | Buy Tickets Here
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