“I don’t think many people are going to see this musical,” Little Sally says at one point during “Urinetown,” the hit Broadway show.
“Because they don’t like being told their way of life is unsustainable?” Officer Lockstock asks.
“Well, yeah. That — plus the title sucks!” she retorts, to the glee of the sold-out audience.
“Urinetown” takes Broadway theatergoers to a fictional town where personal latrines are an outlawed luxury after decades of drought. Instead, the corrupt legislature has instituted a system of public toilets managed by a malevolent monopolist who capitalizes on people’s need to pee.
The show is co-narrated by two of the musical’s characters: Little Sally, a feminine version of Oliver Twist, played by Spencer Kayden, and Officer Lockstock, the town’s likeable executioner, played by Jeff McCarthy. The two routinely break the fourth wall without stepping out of character, while the plot drifts seamlessly between silly and absurd.
While the premise for “Urinetown” is itself a joke, the show’s greatest success is its ability to capitalize on its own absurdity.
The musical opens at the public urinal, where the morning rush is on. The bladder-filled crowd anxiously counts their pennies and asks passing strangers for “pennies for a pee” before one hard-pressed bum gives into nature and pees for free on a wall. His punishment: Officer Lockstock gives him the infamous trip to “Urinetown” (which turns out to be little more than a shove off a 15-story building).
Such is life in “Urinetown” the town.
Meanwhile, “Urinetown” the musical smartly plays on the audience’s sympathies and expectations. The crowd giggles with delight as the people at Public Urinal #9 take over the toilet, peeing as they please. With no regard for tomorrow, and a rallying cry that citizens have a right to pee for free, the radicals overthrow the capitalist pigs and crooked politicians and break the urination laws of supply and demand.
The punch line of the show is that once the regulations on water usage are removed, the town goes to shit — literally. The moral is wonderfully anticlimactic: capitalism may be unpleasant, but it does provide an effective mechanism for distributing water. The people once again rise up, only this time to overthrow their own revolutionary leader (who insists to the end that “the river is inside us!”).
As hilarious as the show’s topsy-turvy plotline is, it serves as a medium for a steady stream of gags and spoofs. The show’s best gags rise above the plot’s easy lowbrow humor, instead spoofing the modern musical. The fun, original score has a familiar ring to it, and the characters are over-the-top versions of Broadway regulars.
To that extent, the show worked much better off-Broadway, where it had a long, popular run before opening on Broadway in September (as the first play to open on Broadway after Sept. 11). In its intimate off-Broadway theater, the show’s cast connected with the audience in a way impossible in the large and impersonal Henry Miller Theater. Off-Broadway, the audience and proletarian characters reveled together in the show’s humble locale, just blocks from Times Square and the heart of capitalism.
In its move on Broadway, “Urinetown” clings to its humble roots. While moving onto Broadway, the show literally tore apart the Henry Miller Theater, piecing it back together with duct tape and serving blue-collar drinks like Miller High Life at the theater’s bar.
Nevertheless, now that “Urinetown” itself is one of Broadway’s most popular musicals, many of the jokes seem less ironic. Like “Urinetown’s” blue-collar revolutionaries learned, the rise to the top is more fun than actually beating the elite. Nevertheless — like “Urinetown’s” cast — the play shines in stardom just like it did during its time in Times Square’s shadows.
In fact, the move to Broadway has allowed the show to develop a new joke: A breath of fresh, albeit “Urinetown,” air, is exactly what New York theatergoers demand.
