'Urinetown' flush with reasons to look past title

By Elizabeth Maupin
ORLANDO SENTINEL
Monday, January 16, 2006

It's the show with the horrible title.

"Urinetown." The Musical. Yikes.

Even Little Sally, the show's wise-beyond-her-years waif, thinks the title is bad.

"That could kill a show pretty good," she says.

What it is, in fact, is hard to say. It's a Broadway hit. It's Fringe. It's parody. It's melodrama. And it opens officially at Zachary Scott Theatre on Saturday.

"It's totally implausible and ridiculous," says Alan Bruun, who directed the show for Orlando, Fla.'s Mad Cow theater group. "But what's glaring at you is that it's plausible, and it's not ridiculous at all."

Imagine yourself in a New York-like city in the middle of a drought so bad that an evil corporation has taken control over all toilets. To pee, you have to pay — and if you don't pay, you're shipped off to Urinetown, a penal colony so indescribable that no one ever comes back.

No wonder the bravest among you decides to lead a group of poor people to revolt against the power structure — and, at the same time, tries to woo the woman he loves, the daughter of the richest man in town.

Ridiculous? Sure — so ridiculous that "Urinetown," which started off at the New York International Fringe Festival in 1999, is the only show in that festival's history to have made it to Broadway.

What attracts some directors is the musical's wicked sense of humor, which some call "subversive" and "guerrilla."

"The tone of Urinetown shifts with every single scene," says Dave Steakley, director of the Zachary Scott Theatre producton, "And the entire cast must be unified through these stylistic changes; Act II opens with 'Fiddler on the Roof' meets 'Sweet Charity,' into the testosterone-filled Jets world from 'West Side Story,' followed by a 'Big River'-style revival tent meeting, and then we're in the throes of a 1940s cinema melodrama like 'Mildred Pierce.' As a director, it is a unique challenge to keep the cast unified while keeping the overall arc of the play intact."

In Urinetown, Officer Lockstock is an enforcer for the bad guys, but he also explains to the audience what's what — on several different levels.

"Welcome to 'Urinetown,' " he says at the start of the show. "Not the place, of course — the musical."

The place is something else.

"It's kind of a mythical place," he says. "A bad place. A place you won't see until Act Two."

You see, Officer Lockstock is part of Urinetown, and he's outside it, just like his waif friend, Little Sally.

"You're too young to understand it now," he tells her, "but nothing can kill a show like too much exposition."

"How about bad subject matter?" she asks.

It's theater that introduces itself as theater, "which is Brechtian if you're into theater," Bruun says — and like the "Ed Sullivan Show" if you're not.

More than that, it's a picture of a world that's terrifically funny but doesn't know it — like "putting your tongue only so far into your cheek and no farther."

At the same time, the score spoofs and celebrates just about everything that has played Broadway, from "Threepenny Opera" to "Les Miserables" and Fosse.

And it has a style, says Bruun, that's both ultra-serious and ultra-satirical — hard to define and harder to play.

"Anything that reeks of style can turn on you in a heartbeat," he says.

People who are nuts about "Urinetown" tend to throw around words like Malthusian and deconstruction — words that are guaranteed to scare other people away. But there's no denying that "Urinetown" has its serious underpinnings, its dark warnings about overpopulation and drought.

"What kind of a musical is this?" asks Little Sally. "The good guys finally take over and then everything starts falling apart."

"Like I said, Little Sally," Lockstock replies. "This isn't a happy musical."

Bruun says, "The wrong way of going about it is to hit the audience over the head with it. It's there. It's obvious. You have to leave it out there for them, not shove it in their face."

" 'Urinetown' is masterful political theater in its ability to communicate its message without ever getting heavy handed or losing its desire to entertain," Steakley says. "I want audiences to laugh harder than they have laughed in a while, and leave the theatre thinking more deeply about their ability to affect change."

Staff editor Michael Barnes contributed to this story.