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Take a tablespoon of Brecht/Weill sardonic dissonance (Threepenny
Opera), add a large dollop of Mark Blitzstein progressive idealism (Cradle
Will Rock), stir in a rousing, old-fashioned pastiche of a Broadway score and
heavily Fosse-influenced choreography. Then season the entire stew with a good shake of
self-referential post modern irony and you come up with Urinetown, an unlikely
hit that originated at the New York International Fringe Festival and has gone on to win
hearts and minds on Broadway.
The plot revolves around a confrontation between the suffering poor and
greedy corporate management, which in and of itself generates more resonance now than it
might have when the show was created a couple of years back--pre-Enron, pre-Tyco, pre-Jack
Welch's retirement package big enough to house a small city of the homeless. But here the
head of Urine Good Company, Caldwell B. Cladwell, is played by audience favorite John
Cullum, and, although his greed, political crookedness, and exploitation of the citizenry
is manifest, it's kept light in tone. How could anyone get incensed over a ham singing
about bunnies? Cullum, in top hat and chinchilla-collared coat, is the most endearing
villain in years.
The show has another, bigger theme to deliver. It is placed in a time
in the presumably not-so-distant future, when human wastefulness and Malthusian
inevitability have created a permanent water shortage: "Water's worth its weight in
gold." With firm laws against private toilets, it has become "a privilege to
pee" and Cullum's company has a monopoly on public urinals, regulated by legislators
he's paid off, charging fees for the privilege of use. In a purely Dickensian moment, the
poor now beg, not for a cup of coffee, but "A penny for a pee, sir?"
A love story subplot between Cullum's ingenue daughter, Hope (Jennifer
Laura Thompson), and Bobby (Hunter Foster), the young idealist who leads the
revolution, adds further interest, as do a handful of other minor characters who become
distinctly individualized on stage. A police officer (Jeff McCarthy) also acts as
narrator; he's the one who gets to step out of character and comment on the goings on.
When the requisite love duet finishes, it is he who points out that Bobby's the hero of
the show--she has to love him.
With the most basic of settings, mostly bare walls, metal doors,
catwalks, ladders and platforms, enhanced significantly by Brian MacDevitt's lighting, the
cast delivers energetic, if simple and derivative, dancing and rousing chorus
numbers, none of it particularly new, but rather a pastiche of tried and true Broadway
forms, including the big gospel show-stopper, "Run Freedom Run." The show also
disarms with its own self-mockery: an awful lyric stuck in a song ("My heart is
like a stallion.") is followed a moment or two later by another character asking
incredulously: "Your heart is like a stallion?" And the
writers are not afraid of taking the story to unexpected places; for all its play on
traditional forms, it manages to avoid predictability.
The entire effort, then, is a delicate balancing act of tone--gentle
satire and tongue-in-cheek spoofery of subjects of day-to-day grave importance, at once
successfully delivering the lightest of fun without failing to register the political
messages. With such honey, more minds may be enlisted than with all the bitterly grim
scientific warnings about ailing Gaia. As entertainment, it should keep audiences smiling
for a long time to come.
New York, September 24, 2002 - Arthur Lazere
