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JOHN FLEMINGTurning an improbable idea into a good musical has worked better than the creators of Urinetown ever imagined.
They said it couldn't be done. A show called Urinetown not only was a hit on Broadway, but it also went on a yearlong tour around the country.
"What kind of musical is this?" asks a promotional brochure, full of glowing blurbs, distributed by the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, presumably for the benefit of leery theatergoers accustomed to fare like The Phantom of the Opera and Fiddler on the Roof.
Urinetown, which opens Tuesday at the center, is essentially a spoof, as its terrible title might suggest, and what it spoofs is musical theater.
In the opening number, a police officer called Lockstock and a street urchin named Little Sally have an exchange that indicates this is not like any other musical.
Little Sally starts to talk about a water shortage, but Lockstock interrupts her.
"Whoa there," he says. "Not all at once. They'll hear more about the water shortage in the next scene."
"Oh, I guess you don't want to overload them with too much exposition, huh?" she says.
"Everything in time, Little Sally. You're too young to understand it now, but nothing kills a show like too much exposition."
For a musical theater fan, it is a delicious piece of self-referential wit. The title also comes up in the dialogue between Lockstock and Sally, played by Tom Hewitt and Meghan Strange.
"What about bad subject matter?" she wonders. "Or a bad title, even? That could kill a show pretty good."
Ah, but that's precisely the point, according to book author and co-lyricist Greg Kotis, who was inspired to conceive of Urinetown on a 1995 backpacking trip to Europe, when he had to count his pennies to afford the public pay toilets in Paris.
"The basic idea was we wanted to make the best possible musical that we were capable of making out of a really awful idea," said Kotis, who has become a keen observer of audience reactions to the show.
"It depends on the theater it's going to, the different alchemy of what's going on in a particular city at a particular time," he said. "Some places have surprised us with their enthusiasm, and other places have been less enthusiastic than we thought they would be."
The lukewarm response of the opening night crowd in Chicago, for instance, surprised Kotis and his collaborator, composer Mark Hollmann, particularly since both began their theater careers there.
"I thought Chicago would be the most receptive of all the cities on our tour, with maybe the exception of Los Angeles," Hollmann said. "But in the first act, I had the sense of people not getting it for a good long time. It took almost the whole act for them to warm up to it. By the second act, we had them. But I was surprised by how long it took for Chicagoans to get with what we were doing."
Urinetown is artfully plotted. Set in a city where a 20-year drought has led to the banning of private toilets, "the central conceit of the show" (as Lockstock explains) is that everyone must pay for "the privilege to pee."
Access to pay toilets makes for an effective metaphor through which to dramatize class warfare in a corrupt capitalist system. The show ends with a musical theater first, a choral tribute to Thomas Malthus, the prophet of overpopulation.
The highlight of the show is Hollmann's pastiche score, chock-full of clever references ranging from Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera to Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock, from West Side Story to Les Miserables to Chicago. He does all this with a five-piece band of woodwind, brass, piano, double bass and percussion, which worked fine in the relatively small Henry Miller Theatre on Broadway but seems undersized for big road theaters like TBPAC's 2,500-seat Morsani Hall.
"I must admit that was a fear that when we got to those big houses, it would just sound ridiculous for there to be only five instruments, amped up to fill those big spaces," Hollmann said. "But it's okay. It's sort of what the show is, that tinny, small, eclectic sound."
Hollmann, who studied under cerebral composers such as Easley Blackwood and Shulamit Ran at the University of Chicago, was influenced by Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier's Tale) in orchestrating Urinetown. "Stravinsky's piece sounds like a random gathering of instruments, which I think was probably his intention, that it sound ragtag and sort of improvised in the instrumentation. It was a way to turn a disadvantage into an advantage."
Urinetown was originally done on a shoestring for the New York International Fringe Festival before attracting producers who brought in director John Rando and choreographer John Carrafa to jazz it up for an off-Broadway staging. In 2001, the show transferred to Broadway, where it played more than two years. "Our Broadway investors are going to keep getting money from this for years to come," Hollmann said.
How did this improbable show become such a success?
"I think we benefited from the success of The Producers," Hollmann said, referring to the Mel Brooks smash hit that had opened the previous season. "There was a real return to musical comedy as a result of that, and a turning away from the megamusical."
Kotis thinks the edgy quality of Urinetown touched a cultural nerve.
"So much in theater and in the popular culture at large, there's a safety to it," he said. "There's an overproduced quality to it where you know, as an audience member, that it has been sort of sanded down to remove all the rough edges, all the risk and all the individuality of it.
"Urinetown was written with the expectation that we weren't going to make any money and no one would see it, so that gave us the freedom to write as individuals as opposed to a committee. There's a hunger for that because there's not enough of it."
Hollmann and Kotis are working on a new show, a musical adaptation of the 1951 Alec Guinness movie The Man in the White Suit, a comedy about an inventor who discovers a fabric that never wears out or becomes dirty. Hollmann thinks of it as a fairly conventional romantic musical, but Kotis can't imagine not being ironic about the form.
"It would be hard for me to do a musical without poking fun at it," Kotis said. "I just assume that the audience knows a lot about storytelling, about theater and film; there has to be some sort of exposure of what you're doing just to relieve that problem. In Urinetown, the fact that the characters talk about there being too much exposition, I think, comes as a relief to the audience."
For Kotis, a delightful footnote to the whole Urinetown experience was hearing of how Forbidden Broadway, the satirical revue, concocted a spoof of the show that spoofs musicals to a tune from Gypsy.
"They did it to You Gotta Get a Gimmick, and our gimmick was a musical with "urine' in the title. We were thrilled. It's sort of the hall of fame to be spoofed by them."
John Fleming can be reached at 727 893-8716 or fleming@sptimes.com
PREVIEW
Urinetown opens Tuesday and runs through March 28 at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. $30.50-$66.50. 813 229-7827 or, outside the bay area, toll-free 1-800-955-1045; www.tbpac.org
2004-05 Broadway series
Oklahoma!, a British revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, opens the 2004-05 Broadway series at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center in October. The biggest hit in the series is Hairspray, winner of eight Tony Awards; it has a two-week run in February. Other highlights include Movin' Out, the Billy Joel-Twyla Tharp dance show, and a revival of Wonderful Town, the Leonard Bernstein-Betty Comden-Adolph Green homage to New York City. The longest run is reserved for a nonsubscription encore, The Phantom of the Opera, which plays for a month over the holidays.
Renewal order forms will be mailed to subscribers at the end of March. Those interested in purchasing new season tickets should call 813 229-7827 or, outside the immediate bay area, toll-free 1-800-955-1045; or visit www.tbpac.org Here's the full schedule:
Oklahoma!, Oct. 26-31; Movin' Out, Jan. 11-16, 2005; Hairspray, Feb. 1-13; Oliver!, March 1-6; Wonderful Town, March 29-April 3; On the Record, May 3-8; Us - 100 Years of America in Song and Dance, Feb. 18-May 8 (Jaeb Theater).
Encore: The Phantom of the Opera, Dec. 8-Jan. 2.