Urinetown the Musical
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Urinetown’s most obvious target is the sort of Depression-era social commentary epitomized by Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 “proletarian opera” The Cradle Will Rock, which is full of prounion song-and-dance numbers that drive home its self-righteous lefty message. Contemporary director and critic Harold Clurman dismissed that show as “boyishly sentimental and comically theatrical,” and those are the shortcomings Kotis and Hollmann mine in this parody, the story of a populist uprising against capitalist greed. In an unnamed city, ruthless businessman Caldwell B. Cladwell has taken advantage of severe water shortages, caused by a 20-year drought, to make everyone pay for the privilege of peeing: all public toilets are run by his monopolistic Urine Good Company. When Cladwell’s idealistic daughter, Hope, falls in love with Bobby Strong, an idealistic bathroom attendant, the two of them lead an ill-fated revolution against Malthusian economics.
In this delightfully overwrought tale Kotis and Hollmann not only lampoon multiple musical-comedy staples–patter songs, hot jazz numbers, bluesy anthems–but squeeze in extended quotes from West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, and Les Miserables. Their most ingenious satire, however, comes from the lips of Little Sally, a street urchin perpetually puzzled by the horrors around her–not the horrors of capitalism run amok but the horrors of a script riddled with holes. That’s just life in a musical, she’s told by street-tough Officer Lockstock, the show’s narrator.
