They (the play’s creators) go out of their way to make sure that you know that you are not supposed to take this too seriously. “If the audience doesn’t laugh then we’ve just failed. The serious matters of “Urinetown” are “the underpinning of what is essentially just a laugh fest,” Sbordone says. Yeats’s concept of “tragic gaiety” and Nietzsche’s “amor fati” (“love of fate”) – concepts which posit that extraordinary strife can lead to extraordinary triumph or even joy, however sardonic. “Most good comedies are centered in human tragedy,” Sbordone says, echoing W. “It’s so easy, given all these themes, to make this play serious,” Sbordone says, to which the cast gathered for the round-table interview collectively utters “Um-hum” in agreement. “It’s hard not to laugh at ‘ Don’t Be the Bunny,’ ” says Levine of a song sung by the uber-malevolent Cladwell – a song which Sbordone sardonically notes “is about murder.” Never mind that – spoiler alert! – some characters get murdered. He rightfully notes that “the ‘absurd’ is a very particular literary device, a genre, and this is parody in its greatest form – it’s just fun.” He prefers another word to describe the musical: “ridiculous.” “When I first read the synopsis, I said ‘Holy shit, this is an encyclopedia!’ ” says director and City Rep co-founder John Sbordone of the play’s satire.īut Sbordone is adamant that “Urinetown,” which was nominated for 10 Tony Awards and won three, including Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score, doesn’t get weighed down by its weighty themes. The play even flogs itself, as when the street urchin Little Sally (Angela Young) breaks the “fourth wall” and proclaims that “Urinetown” is a “horrible title” for a musical. There’s more: Specific musicals such as “Les Miserables” and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera” are parodied, along with the Broadway musical artform in toto.
Meanwhile, the satiric barbs of “Urinetown” come fast and furious, taking aim at fascism, capitalism, authoritarianism, corporate greed, police brutality, political corruption, abuse of the poor, and the tensions between personal freedoms versus societal good. The status quo is disrupted when Bobby Strong (Alexander Loucks), an assistant custodian at the poorest, filthiest urinal in town, instigates a pee-for-free revolt – and falls in love with Cladwell’s daughter Hope (Laniece Fagundes) along the way.
Refuseniks who buck the pay-to-pee system are banished to a mysterious place called Urinetown – and are never seen again.
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