Reviews 2004
Reviews 2004
✭✭✭✭✩
music & lyrics by Mark Hollmann, book & lyrics by Greg Kotis, directed by John Rando
CanStage and Dancap Private Equity, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
May 27-July 11, 2004
Urinetown is what Fringe folk dream of. The 1999 New York Fringe Festival hit went on to Broadway and won Tonys for book, score and direction. While the title is “awful” as a character says, this is not so much a musical about micturition as an outrageously inventive send up of the musical genre itself.
Set in a Fritz Lang-like metropolis sometime in the near future, Urinetown posits a twenty-year drought that has taken flushing out of the home and into the hands of the megacorporation Urine Good Company that charges people for the privilege of answering nature’s call. Hope Cladwell (the charming, helium-voiced Cara Leslie), daughter of the evil CEO of UGC (a menace-deficient Frank Moore), falls in love with lowly lavatory supervisor Bobby Strong (the gallantly faux-heroic Stephen Patterson), who leads a revolution against the tyranny of UGC for the right to pee freely.
The plot is funny but the style is even funnier. The dialogue is couched in the artificial hard-boiled lingo of 1940s radio serials and B-movies. The music, heavily influenced by Kurt Weill, is half-homage, half parody. As if retro self-reflexiveness were not enough, the dual narrators of Officer Lockstock (the hilariously perfect David Keeley) and Little Sally (spot-on wise girl Jennifer Waiser) discuss the progress of the musical they’re in. To top it off, director John Rando and choreographer John Carrafa prick every dramatic and dance musical cliché in the book.
Not all runs smoothly. While Act 1 is a steady stream of golden moments, Act 2 piddles along aimlessly. Parody dips into plain bad taste in the sicko number “Snuff That Girl,” Rando starts to repeat himself, and the meta-humour wears thin. Despite these lapses Urinetown’s cleverness quotient is highest of any show in town. Zip down and give it a whizz.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2004-06-03.
Photo: Cara Leslie and Frank Moore. ©2004 CanStage.
2004-06-03
Urinetown