Review: Encores! Brings Urinetown Back With a Soft-Edged All-Star Revival

A show about the upper class oppressing the underprivileged under the guise of public safety while enriching themselves? The time is certainly right for a revival of the 2001 musical Urinetown, if nothing else because the parallels between its broad allegory and our current sociopolitical landscape are inescapable. But Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis’s satire is more than just a political tract. Both the Threepenny Opera-like flavorings of Hollmann’s score and the winking send-up of musical-theater conventions in their lyrics and Kotis’s book suggest a modern-day attempt at Bertolt Brecht’s “epic theater” alienation. It’s that stylistically daring side that gets rather short shrift in the new production that opened last night as part of New York City Center’s Encores! series.

Urinetown is set during a long drought that has caused enough of a water shortage that even private toilets are unfeasible. Mega-corporation Urine Good Company has taken advantage by forcing people to pay a high fee to use their public toilets, with lawful harsh penalties for those who relieve themselves outside of them. Old Man Strong (Kevin Cahoon) is the victim of one of those penalties after Officers Lockstock (Greg Hildreth) and Barrel (Christopher Fitzgerald) catch him peeing in public and arrest him, never to return. His son, Bobby (Jordan Fisher), eventually becomes the leader of the resistance against UGC, inspired in part by a romantic encounter with pure-hearted Hope Cladwell (Stephanie Styles). Little does he know then that she is the daughter of UGC CEO Caldwell B. Cladwell (Rainn Wilson).

“This isn’t a happy musical,” Officer Lockstock, who doubles as narrator, says to street urchin Little Sally (Pearl Scarlett Gold). He’s dead-on as far as the show’s vision of humanity goes. Far from being merely the stirring tale of the oppressed rising up against their oppressors, Urinetown finds moral gray areas on both sides. As draconian as UGC’s policies are, they undoubtedly helped prevent the town’s water supply from disappearing. And as noble as their cause is, the populace Bobby leads in revolt are also painted as bloodthirsty and short-sighted.

True to Hollman and Kotis’s Brechtian aspirations, Urinetown maintains a lightness of tone even at its most tragic (“but the music is so happy,” says Little Sally). And their frequent jabs at the musical genre ensure we’re not allowed to get too invested in the characters and situations onstage. Beyond cautioning Little Sally about the dangers of “too much exposition” in the opening number, Officer Lockstock goes so far as to spoil what might have been a central mystery in a conventional show—what exactly is the eponymous Urinetown—as a tossed-off aside in the middle of Act 1.

Balancing the sincere and the sardonic: that’s the challenge Urinetown presents. It’s one that Teddy Bergman, the director of this new Encores! production, hasn’t fully met. Though some of the technical elements suggest he grasps the Brechtian style—Clint Ramos’s relatively pared-down scenic design, with a large “Urine Good Company” appropriately dominating the top of the stage; the occasional gratuitous bright flashes of Justin Townsend’s lighting design—his production overall errs on the side of sincerity more than irony. With the United States on a terrifying path toward the kind of oligarchical power the show bluntly satirizes, perhaps that’s the only palatable approach to material like this these days.

But that also means the smart-alecky jokes come off as dated: a relic of an earlier age of postmodern cool exemplified by the likes of Pulp Fiction and the Scream movies. Or might the japes have still worked had Bergman approached them with more devil-may-care conviction? The sharply referential edge of John Carrafa’s choreography for the original 2001 off-Broadway and Broadway productions, for instance, has been sanded off in Mayte Natalio’s comparably nondescript work here.

Still, when the voices are as glorious and the personalities as strong as in this production, it’s hard to quibble too much. Jordan Fisher is a charismatically youthful Bobby, his gospel-like “Run, Freedom, Run!” number the highlight of the show. He plays well off Stephanie Styles, who exudes naïveté with a bit of a wink as Hope. Keala Settle brings both fearsomely impressive belt and moments of vulnerability as Penelope Pennywise, the authoritarian owner of the filthy urinal at which Bobby initially works.

Compared to supporting performers like Cahoon, Jeff Hiller, and John Yi, who play their characters as broadly as possible, Rainn Wilson is somewhat muted as Mr. Cladwell, only verging toward mustache-twirling villainy in Act 2. Wilson’s performance could be said to encapsulate this soft-edged revival as a whole. Nevertheless, the production is solid enough to offer a sense of the show’s mischievous, even sobering comic provocations.