URINETOWN IS READY TO TAKE SOME ENCORES!
With URINETOWN soon returning to the theatrical horizon (thanks to Encores!), memories from the past quarter-century are flooding back.
Memory One: Late 1998. I walk into the office of an artistic director of a highly regarded theater company. He starts talking without as much as a “Hello.”
“You think it’s easy being an artistic director?” he snarls, holding a bound copy of a script he’s grasping from the bottom. He’s slowly waving it back and forth slowly as a way of minimizing it.
“You get unsolicited scripts, including one called URINETOWN that authors expect you to mount. I don’t even want to read the damn thing.”
Memory Two: Summer, 1999: Someone, though, has read the script by Greg Kotis that included the lyrics that he co-wrote with composer Mark Hollman. Enough people approve it as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. The theater – a garage, really, at off-the-beaten track Stanton and Ridge Streets – is as hot as Mrs. Lovett’s oven, but no one leaves the performance that I attend.
Horace Vandergelder in THE MATCHMAKER maintains that “a million is made by producing something that everybody needs every day.” Well, Caldwell B. Cladwell has something that everybody needs many times a day, by seducing the law into prohibiting home toilets so that he can profit from his own pay toilets.
Younger readers may have never experienced pay toilets, which began plaguing the American public in 1910 and stayed around for about 60 more years. But even with their demise, which of us has not been on a street when nature has called only to have restaurateurs curtly turn us away? So, in a manner of speaking, URINETOWN may be the musical with which every human being can most empathize.
Cladwell’s evil machinations has made him – you should pardon the expression – flush. That’s infuriated young Bobby Strong, an impoverished workaday who rebels against Cladwell’s Urine Good Company. However, complications arise when Bobby falls in love with a lass who returns it: Hope Cladwell. Yes, the CEO’s daughter.
How can love survive? It can’t – because one of them literally doesn’t. And yet, URINETOWN, saddled with the most unlikely title, turns out to be an entertaining and amusing agit-prop musical that finds its way to a cautiously optimistic conclusion.
We marvel at a score that’s one of the best at embracing so many different styles. Songs range from razzmatazz Broadway (“Mr. Cladwell”) and tender waltzes (“Follow Your Heart”), to ominously dangerous (“Don’t Be the Bunny”), gospel-tinged (“Run, Freedom, Run”) and more.
So, at show’s end on that summer night in 1999, we’re fatigued from heat exhaustion, but we still find the energy to applaud, stomp and cheer. On the way out, one theatergoer purposely paraphrases a line from THE PRODUCERS’ 1968 film: “Didja ever think you could love a show called URINETOWN?”
Memory Three: May 6, 2001: URINETOWN officially opens off-Broadway, albeit in one of the town’s least glamorous venues. Many a producer who’s been here in the past has subjected his or her gluteus maximus to a lumpy and/or rickety seat and is thus reluctant to return. But many change their minds after hearing enough good buzz; they take their weary, uh, bones to the hovel. Yes, the theater is old and tired, but the cast is new and bright. And, so…
Memory Four: Nine days later: Here comes the greatest proof that URINETOWN is on the rise: Grammy-winning producer Jay David Saks is recording the cast album. Yes, despite being an off-Broadway show in a dump, it’s caught the attention Bill Rosenfield, A&R director of RCA Victor, then a major label and player in the cast album field.
At the recording session, Kotis and Hollman smile when they hear their two best jokes. The first comes from Jeff McCarthy, playing Officer Lockstock, who insists that he’ll unswervingly enforce the laws: “We, we never fail.”
(In case you missed it, those first two identical pronouns constitute the jest…)
Soon after, Nancy Opel, playing Cladwell’s major domo, reminds those in need that “It’s a privilege to pee” and “If you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go through me.”
What pleases Kotis and Hollman most of all is that they’re no longer hearing their score on their little cassette recorders. Now the score booms forth on first-class speakers that are reserved for the Big Time – which is where URINETOWN will be in fewer than four months.
Memory Five: The final preview on Broadway. The audience is hushed into silence as a police officer escorts a woebegone individual to the stage. As it turns out, he’s the pianist, and the four first notes immediately remind everyone of THE THREEPENNY OPERA. Very few musicals are so quick to telegraph what kind of evening it will offer, but we now know we’d expecting a Kurt Weill-ish evening.
And we get it. The excitement continues throughout, with cheers for each song. So many of us leave the theater on a glorious high. Surely when the show opens the following night, the Wednesday reviews will proclaim September 11, 2001 as a glorious day in Broadway history.
As we know, it wasn’t a great day in American history. URINETOWN’s opening will have to be postponed.
Memory Six: September 20, 2001: URINETOWN finally opens officially on Broadway. “Sensational” (Times). “Wild and happy” (Post), “Exciting” (Observer), and “Remarkably successful” (The New Yorker).
Memory Seven: June 2, 2002: URINETOWN snags Tonys for Best Book, Score and Director (John Rando). Usually that’s enough to win Best Musical, but URINETOWN loses to THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE. Nevertheless, it will outrun that show by more than two months. It would have undoubtedly sprinted past its 965thperformance if it hadn’t been forced to vacate the theater so that a skyscraper could be built atop it
By this time, the artistic director cited in Memory One has undoubtedly learned that you can’t judge a book (and lyrics) by its cover’s title.
Memory Eight: Some years later. I’m walking down Eighth Avenue where I spot two longtime Broadway observer-friends. They’re close to doubled-over with laughed. When I asked why, they said they’d just heard that the German production of URINETOWN will play Germany, where it will be called PINKELSTADT.
Memory Nine: From then to now: It’s not just Germany. Productions proliferate here, there and everywhere. The show that was assumed to be a turkey opens in Turkey in 2023.
Now, in 2025 alone, 152 productions are scheduled in Pataskala, Ohio; Mankato, Minnesota; and Busan, South Korea – not to mention the one at Encores! that plays Feb. 5-16. Tickets are available at www.nycitycenter.org. It’ll be a privilege to be there and get many more memories. Wonder if that dismissive artistic director will attend?
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year onwww.broadwayradio.com. His calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY: 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – is now available on Amazon.
