“Urinetown,” a former Broadway hit about a futuristic Gotham where people must pay to pee, is enjoying a local revival at Herricks High School.
It’s replete with dark blue jokes carrying double meanings – not the sort of thing one usually sees on a high school stage.
But John McNeur, music and performing arts director for the Herricks district, said Herricks maintains a tradition of staging the unexpected.
“I think that Herricks High School has a tradition of doing things like Sondheim and other musicals that are not always done on the high school stage,” he said.
McNeur sees “Urinetown,” with its plot line of a people’s revolt against the Urine Good Company profiting from all that pee, as a timely piece of theater.
“The humor is a little dark, but it is very funny especially given the things going on in the Middle East, with the masses revolting. It’s kind of poignant,” McNeur said.
The characters are intentionally framed as caricatures in this send-up on social standards and the form of musical theater itself. It is a play that pokes fun at itself as it presents a critique of the capitalistic imperative that recalls the acerbic words of Mack the Knife in “Three-Penny Opera” by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill: “What is killing a man compared to hiring a man?”
McNeur said “Three-Penny Opera” is on his wish list of future shows. In “Urinetown,” characters are killed as routinely as they’re employed and the talented cast of young actors bringing the play to life appreciate what they’re doing.
McNeur said the original plan was to produce “Rent,” but he thought the drug use depicted in that show wouldn’t be appropriate for a high school show. Apart from content, the final choice was based on the abilities of the high school’s singers, he said.
Director Tommie Gibbons, who said he suggested and fought for the school to produce “Urinetown,” is a veteran choreographer of student productions in the 1990s.
“Kids like to do a show that’s edgy,” Gibbons said. “And the writing is so good.”
In recent years, Herricks productions have included “Into the Woods” and “West Side Story,” certainly an edgy musical when it made its Broadway debut and still a relevant piece of social commentary today.
“The music’s great. It’s also a fun satire on big business and poor neighborhoods,” said senior Douglas Fabian, who plays Bobby Strong, a character who goes from underling to hero in the course of the play.
It seems that almost everyone in Urinetown is working for Urine Good Company and its hyper-corporate CEO Caldwell B. Cladwell, the biggest bad guy among many, regulating the right to micturate or, in the case of the bad guy cops, banishing people who don’t use the public toilets to the dreaded realm of Urinetown.
Strong finally musters up the courage to start permitting people in the city slum where he’s stationed to pee for free. That eventually gets him tossed off the top of a building. But his act of defiance sparks an uprising of the underclasses, and he makes a ghostly reappearance in “Tell Her I Love Her,” a song that is simultaneously poignant and funny.
That two-way intention typifies this play in which the narrator, Officer Lockstock explains the need for just enough, but not too much exposition, in a play that is self-referential, along with its myriad references to lots of other things.
“Every line is a pun, every line has allusions to high school musicals,” sophomore John Brautigam, aka Officer Lockstock, said.
For all its humorous allusions and the intentionally buffoonish onstage antics, there is a clear morale to the story.
“It also shows it’s important to stand up for what you believe in,” said senior Michelle Goldrich, who plays Penelope Pennywise, one of Cladwell’s minions and gets to sing the seminal number, “It’s a privilege to pee.”
Or as the cast sings in the “Urinetown” tune: “It’s the oldest story-Masses are oppressed; Faces, clothes, and bladders All distressed. Rich folks get the good life, Poor folks get the woe. In the end, it’s nothing you don’t know.”
But it’s something the cast of the play at Herricks is hoping the community is willing to be reminded of first-hand when the production goes up this weekend and the weekend after in the high school’s auditorium.
“We don’t do the typical Saturday night shows,” said Brautigam.
Gibbons said he also chose the show because of the ensemble effort that enervates virtually every scene.
“It’s a very active ensemble story and I love the show. I think it’s a hysterically funny show,” he said.
But in the Brechtian tradition, it’s hysterically funny with caustic undertones, including a reference to the 19th century English social theorist Thomas Malthus, who posited that population growth would eventually outstrip the agricultural production needed to support it. “Urinetown” lyricist Greg Koltis, who also wrote the play’s script, was interjecting a timely message in between the laughs he was trying to evoke.
In a recent rehearsal, the Herricks cast appeared poised to make it all come together at the high school auditorium in performances on Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and a matinee on Sunday at 2 p.m. Two more performances are slated for April 1 and 2 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for senior citizens and students.
