Parody? Comedy?

Whatever it is, 'Urinetown' is a hit -- and it's wickedly funny

Elizabeth Maupin
Sentinel Theater Critic

September 16, 2005

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.

So how do you tell people about Urinetown?

"My parents down in their retirement community in Stuart want to say to people, 'Hey, my son's in this show,' " says Eric Pinder, who plays the show's narrator, Officer Lockstock, in Mad Cow Theatre's upcoming production. "But they have to explain what it is."

What it is, in fact, is hard to say. It's a Broadway hit. It's Fringe. It's parody. It's melodrama.

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

Ridiculous revolution

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.

Now Urinetown is spreading to Central Florida, first in a couple of school productions this summer, and now at Mad Cow Theatre, the professional theater in downtown Orlando.

Pinder first saw it on a trip to Broadway in the summer of 2002.

"I fell in love with it instantly," he says. "And the part of Officer Lockstock -- I thought, I have to play this part."

So much so, he says, that he was working on a letter to try to wangle rights to produce the show at the Orlando Fringe until he heard Mad Cow would be staging it.

It turns out that Bruun had seen Urinetown about the same time.

"I just sat there with a big, goofy grin on my face for the entire show," he says.

What attracted him was Urinetown's wicked sense of humor -- a sense of humor he calls "subversive" and "guerrilla."

"The nature of corruption isn't something we're unfamiliar with," says Bruun. "Yet it's taken to a wild degree."

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, well, hard to define

For Mad Cow, which has delighted in shows that comment on their own theatricality, Urinetown seemed like just the thing. It follows a string of such plays, from Bertolt Brecht's The Life of Galileo to Thornton Wilder's Our Town, which closed the theater's eighth season in July.

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 West Side Story to Threepenny Opera and Les Miserables to Fosse.

"It has its Bernstein moment, its Gilbert and Sullivan Act I finale that goes on and on and on," Pinder says. "It makes fun of musicals, but with a love for the form."

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.

Melodrama and parody

In rehearsals, his 16 actors have been trying things out -- "just lobbing tennis balls up in the air" -- and this production's style will come from them.

"Now it's about finding that declamatory, no-sense-of-humor, that's-why-it's funny style."

For Pinder, performing in Urinetown means not walking a fine line between melodrama and parody, but playing both at once.

"You want to hit the comedy moments, but you can't look like you're hitting the comedy moments.

"You can't rest for a moment," 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."

But for Mad Cow, the way to be serious in Urinetown is not to be serious at all.

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

And he's not worried at all that Orlandoans might not take to this show with such a, well, unsavory name. With its parodies of theatrical styles, he says, it's an ideal show for Mad Cow.

"It fits very nicely in a company that hasn't made its name doing musical theater," he says. "For people who come to Mad Cow, they'll celebrate this."

Emaupin@Orlandosentinel.Com

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