Jokes flow freely in Skylight's 'Urinetown'

Mike Fischer
Special to the Journal Sentinel

“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.

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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.

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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, high-octane 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 skylightmusictheatre.org.  Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.

PROGRAM NOTES

Cardiff Giant and Neo-Futurists: That’s the names of the two Chicago fringe theater companies – the first long gone and the second still with us – through which “Urinetown” was born. Cardiff Giant tilted left with hard-edged satire; the Neo-Futurists tilt toward the anarchic and are more avowedly meta-theatrical. That difference in aesthetic and style is reflected in this piece, which is both politically charged and playfully theatrical – both heavily satiric and lightly comic. It’s devilishly hard to get the temperature and consistency of this particular bowl of porridge just right; as suggested above, the Skylight production often loses sight of the politics in delivering the funny.

“Chicago”: Despite its huge debt to “Threepenny Opera,” the closer analogue for “Urinetown” might be the brilliant “Chicago,” similarly structured as a pastiche (of vaudeville, in “Chicago”) that’s also a satire of American life.  (How it got swept by the very good and original but nevertheless inferior “A Chorus Line” at the 1976 Tony Awards remains a travesty in the history of the American musical, but I digress).  “Chicago” is also often played hard for laughs, robbing it of its scope; the 2017 touring production at the Marcus Center is an illustrative example.

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Set: Brandon Kirkham’s functional, multilevel set is almost comically two-dimensional, highlighting the artifice in a piece that’s avowedly theatrical.  Or maybe that’s just the polite way of saying that this set appears to have been built on a tight budget.  On opening night, it could occasionally be comical in ways Kirkham surely didn’t intend; a large flat descending from the fly space and designed to denote the wall of Cladwell’s headquarters swung gently from side to side in the first scene during which it was used.  The set changes involving Cladwell’s headquarters also took too long.

Kaylee Annable scolds Rick Pendzich in Skylight Music Theatre's "Urinetown."

Who Tells the Story?  “Urinetown” features dueling narrators: Rick Pendzich’s sadistic Officer Lockstock and Kaylee Annable’s ostensibly naïve Little Sally, who is dumb like a fox. The exchanges between them are funny, and meant to be. But here, again, there could have been still more, had Lockstock’s twisted humor been laced with something darker.  This one isn’t on the actors, whose performances are consistent with the tone of this production.  It’s the tilt in the production itself which undercuts the power of their exchanges.

Lucas Pastrana and Rachael Zientek sing in Skylight Music Theatre's "Urinetown."

Rachael Zientek: As many prior reviews attest, I’ve been a Zientek fan for a long time, first falling hard for her voice and, over the past several years, watching her impressive growth as a straight-up actor. She’s wonderful in this production as Hope Cladwell, the rich ingénue with a heart of gold.  Zientek doesn’t just sing well – no surprise there – but also straddles the line between naïve and woke; for all that Hope’s privileged and sheltered life lacks in knowledge regarding the larger world, she’s a keen observer and quick study, seeing more than she herself sometimes realizes.  Zientek’s comic timing is true to Hope’s song of innocence and experience; her Hope doesn’t herself sometimes realize how funny she can be.  Zientek will appear next as Medium Alison in a production that should already be on your calendar for the next theater season: Forward Theater’s Wisconsin premiere of the Tony-winning musical “Fun Home” – bettered only by “Hamilton” among new musicals made in this millennium.  Starring the Tony-winning Karen Olivo as Alison, Forward’s production runs from Nov. 1-25.