Jokes flow freely in Skylight’s ‘Urinetown’
“Most Americans would have said that the title alone made ‘Urinetown’ not just a bad idea for a musical but a really terrible idea for a musical.”
So says “Urinetown” composer and lyricist Mark Hollman. But he joined buddy Greg Kotis (book and lyrics) in winning Tonys for their work on this onetime fringe favorite that stormed Broadway in 2001.
It’s now installed at Skylight Music Theatre, where a production opened Friday night under the direction of Ray Jivoff (stage) and David Bonofiglio (music).
“Urinetown” advances a seemingly wacky premise that nevertheless rings true: In some not-too distant future — in which public services have all been privatized and there’s an even a greater gulf separating rich from poor — severe water shortages have transformed peeing from a right to a privilege.
Urine Good Company — run by the dastardly Caldwell B. Cladwell (Steven M. Koehler) — charges a fee to pee at various public installations like the one run by a sadistic Penelope Pennywise (Amber Smith). Officers Lockstock (Rick Pendzich) and Barrel (Tim Rebers) haul off anyone daring to pee for free.
As these names suggest, the satire in “Urinetown” is broad; its early numbers invoke Brecht and Weill’s “Threepenny Opera,” with its incisive and bitterly funny satire of class divisions and moral corruption.
But the impulses driving “Urinetown” are more comic and anarchic. In addition to satirizing the way we live now, it deliriously sends up everyone from Bach to the B-52s, in a pastiche that also includes a generous selection of American musicals.
Whole numbers reprise iconic scenes from the likes of “West Side Story,” “Les Miz” and “Fiddler” — from which the legendary bottle dance gets remade here with plungers (choreography by Ryan Cappleman). The flag waving from the barricade in the redo here of “Les Miz” is urine yellow rather than red. You get the idea.
So does Jivoff, who takes us from satiric spoof to camp.
Everything in this production gets played for a joke; the bad guys are so busy mugging that they never seem remotely menacing.
Some of the gags are great; I was particularly taken with those involving James Carrington as Cladwell’s toady, numerous Easter eggs involving past Skylight productions, and everything involving romantic leads Rachael Zientek and Lucas Pastrana, wonderfully balancing the daffy and the sweet while singing well — par for the course in this musically strong production.
But many other gags (and characters) are trying much too hard to be funny; too clever or pointed, they’re also subject to the law of diminishing returns (and laughs).
The net effect lowers the stakes; it’s hard to care about characters and their misfortunes when this spirited, highoctane cast is so vigorously cranking the laugh-o-meter. There ought to be some Brechtian darkness at the edge of “Urinetown”; it’s not laughter, after all, that leads the desperate and downtrodden in this dystopia to pee in their pants.
“Urinetown” continues through June 10 at the Cabot Theatre, 158 N. Broadway. For tickets, visit skylight musictheatre.org. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.