At Encores!, ‘Urinetown’ Is Still Potable

What a week to revive a musical comedy about corporate raiders sabotaging the public good. Urinetown, a defiantly scatological show that premiered on Broadway in 2001, is about a community in the throes of a drought where, thanks to the dominion of the Urine Good Company over the water supply, citizens must pay for the privilege of peeing. Twenty-four years later, City Center has brought it back as part of its Encores! series, right as the world’s richest man tries to dismantle our federal government via a group named for an internet meme of a Shiba Inu. Sheer stupidity, I guess, contains a lot of prophecy. “No one’s gettin’ anywhere for free!” Penelope Pennywise, who runs one of the “public amenities,” announces early on in act one. “Don’t you think I have bills of my own to pay?! Don’t you think I have taxes and tariffs and payoffs to meet too?! Well I do!” Soon, I assume, she’ll be confirmed for a Cabinet position.

That tariff line gets a big, nervous laugh from the City Center audience, the kind of double-edged response that can charge a revival with contemporary relevance but also risks reducing it to sloganeering. (It reminded me of the clapter in Merrily We Roll Along when the news anchors mention Roe v. Wade.) In the case of Urinetown, brought back to life with appropriately shaggy direction by Teddy Bergman, the fact that the show is so absurd ends up making it remarkably sturdy. Bergman and the cast don’t have to, and thankfully don’t try to, reach at all for you to get how the fates of these poor dehydrated heroes speak to us today. It’s more damning, and darkly hilarious, that we have all descended to their scatological level.

Of course, Urinetown does deliver on all the lowbrow punning that starts with the title, but the show does contain plenty of cleverness, and reveals as much earnest heart as Gen-Xers might’ve allowed themselves in the late ’90s. The show’s origins lie in its creator Greg Kotis’s rage at having to pay for public toilets in Europe after performing at a festival in Romania with his experimental troupe, the Neo-Futurists. Kotis and Mark Hollman, who wrote the music and co-wrote the lyrics, went on to develop a work that combines running jokes about penis size with truly jazzy show-tune earworms, and shoutouts to Thomas Malthus — the sort of show that begs you to call it Brechtian and then makes fun of you for misusing the word Brechtian, a show that sends up Les Miz while also straightforwardly doing Les Miz. You do really care about the rebels’ right to pee for free. Urinetown wound its way from the New York Fringe Festival, in 1999, to Broadway, where it premiered right after 9/11 (this show has some weird knack for current events), won a slew of Tonys but not Best Musical (which went to the highly palatable Thoroughly Modern Millie). Since, it has had an improbably, but fittingly, long life in regional and student productions. (Teen Pennywises make regular appearances at the Jimmy Awards.) The show’s both a one-off lightning strike of an experiment intersecting with commercial success, and the sort of thing that precedes similar lovingly crafted but “up-yours” works like Avenue Q — I’m morbidly fascinated how the nihilism of that might play in an Encores! space — or The Book of Mormon.

As a director, Bergman has crisscrossed between proscenium and immersion in KPOP and Life and Trust, but here he plays Urinetown straight, letting the contradictions joke for themselves. The action plays out with the sumptuous Encores! orchestra placed atop a row of shabby porta- potty sheds, and what more of a visual metaphor do you need? Then, as is usual here, the cast contains a sprinkling of musical-theater aces: Greg Hildreth, a pro at welding smarm and actual charm, strolls out as our narrator, the cheerily authoritarian Office Lockstock. If you delight in character actors, the roles of other cartoon functionaries are played by the likes of Christopher Fitzgerald (so doofy!), Jeff Breckenridge (with a very sweaty mustache as a limp senator), and Jeff Hiller (wringing big laughs with a mere eccentric giggle). Rainn Wilson has come in from the world of TV to play the sneering plutocrat Caldwell B. Cladwell. If he’s less comfortable with the music, his Dwight intensity at least lends the character an unnerving acidity. The night I saw Urinetown, Tiffany Mann stepped up to replace Keala Settle as Pennywise, digging into the petty potty tyrant with fervor, with a voice that launches out of her like an arc of electricity off a Tesla coil. In a show like this, the heroes tend to be less interesting, but Jordan Fisher acquits himself well, and shows off the clarity of tenor, at the task of playing the cardboard hero Bobby Strong. As his love Hope Cladwell, a nepo baby with a heart big enough to turn her into a class traitor, Stephanie Styles is pretty astounding, simultaneously parodying and selling the simple-minded ingénue. Her soprano is crisp, her comedic timing precise, and she can pull off a punchline by simply pointing one of her off-white LaDuca character shoes.

For a piece like Urinetown to sustain itself across two acts, the sweetness has to bleed into the arch irony without flooding the water supply with glucose (or, alternatively, leaching it out and leaving only irony). Here, for the most part, everything remains potable. A crucial test lies in the role of Little Sally, an urchin of the Gavroche variety who chats with Office Lockstock about the state of the city and also the state of the metatheatrics. Why, she asks, don’t they discuss the effects of the water shortage on irrigation or, even, laundry? “Sometimes — in a musical — it’s better to focus on one big thing rather than a lot of little things,” he responds. It’s a part that might tempt toward a cloying delivery, but the production’s Sally Pearl Scarlett Gold stays chipper and wry. The show faces a stiffer narrative turn later on, when Hope’s revolution takes hold and Urinetown starts taking jabs at the new guard as well as the old. The equal-opportunity “man, forget revolution, we’re doomed either way” posture is where the show feels most dated, in the mode of a comfortable stoner telling you to just check out. Then again, there’s prescience there too. This show is all premised on ecological collapse. Caught in our circus of shuddering and laughing at how dumb everything seems right now, we must remember that an even dumber and crueler political future is just around the corner. What should we do then? Maybe revive Urinetown again.

Urinetown is at New York City Center.