This Friday, the outlandishly titled Urinetown: The Musical opens at Portland State in the Lincoln Hall main stage. The play, written in 2001 by Mark Hollman and Greg Kotis, tells the story of a town where a greedy corporation has started charging the town’s citizens to use its bathrooms.
This Friday, the outlandishly titled Urinetown: The Musical opens at Portland State in the Lincoln Hall main stage. The play, written in 2001 by Mark Hollman and Greg Kotis, tells the story of a town where a greedy corporation has started charging the town’s citizens to use its bathrooms.
“The underlying themes of the musical are sustainability, water preservation, corporate greed and corruption—but told in a very funny way,” director Glenn Gauer said.
“Unlike some musicals, there is definitely a major purpose and theme. It’s about sustainability, which is something that PSU constantly is aware of and tries to promote,” said actor Caitlan Spencer, a junior double major in theater and English. “It’s powerful and meaningful, but it is very much a farce.”
“The bathrooms have been privatized for profit, so you have a bunch of angry people who are scrambling to put enough money together to pay for basic human needs, so to speak,” Gauer explained. “They finally rebel. There’s a hero that emerges and leads them into the rebellion.”
That hero is Bobby Strong, played by economics senior Peter Travis. The character is a member of the city’s poor, one who originally works at one of the privatized bathroom facilities but later leads the revolution.
“Bobby Strong is the dashing every-man, the stereotypical male ingénue of musicals that we’re satirizing here,” Travis said. “I think the journey of the musical is him getting woken up to a new potential reality that involves more than just squalor and disgustingness.”
Spencer plays the character Little Sally, a “precocious tween” who is one of the narrators of the play.
“What Little Sally represents is a new generation,” Spencer said. “She is that new hope of the next generation being smarter than the one before and learning from their mistakes.”
Urinetown is unlike most musicals in that it pokes good-natured fun at the entire musical genre, according to Gauer.
“There are a number of very well-known classic musicals that are referenced in the piece,” Gauer said. “People who are familiar with musicals will recognize those moments.”
Travis said that the production beautifully satirizes the conventions of the musicals that inspired it.
“It’s a valentine to musical theater actors,” he said. “This one is a treasure because all theater people can appreciate this as it pokes fun at musical theater while also getting across an important point.”
Portland State alumni Jeff Spence, who plays Hot Blades Harry, one of the poor townspeople, said that the production takes ideas from other popular musicals and “warps them all into one little show.”
“The characters in the play are conscious of the fact that they’re performing a musical,” Gauer explained. “They even discuss it. They refer to the audience. They’re aware that there’s an audience there, watching them perform a musical.”
Theater junior Talon Bigelow plays Officer Lockstock, who also narrates the show.
“It’s pretty self-referential, but it’s all to make a point that it’s being used to kind of convey a message,” Bigelow said. “And it’s not trying to be overly preachy. It’s having fun with it, but also there’s a serious undertone.”
A musical titled Urinetown can be difficult to advertise. Posters for the production were taken down in several businesses because the title was “offensive.”
“There’s always controversy about the name of the musical. In fact that’s commented on by the characters in the play, about how the musical that they’re performing has a terrible name,” Gauer said. “People that are familiar with musicals know the piece, but to reach beyond that to the general public, it does take an extra effort.”
For Bigelow, the show has a great deal of intelligence on top of being fun.
“Most people are kind of thrown by the title,” he said. “People ask me if there’s a lot of potty humor. No, it’s really a smart play. It just has a bad title. Even the characters think so.”
“We picked this for our season before the Occupy Movements cropped up,” Gauer said. “But it certainly speaks to some of the sentiment that has been expressed by that movement.”
Spence agreed with the connection to the Occupy Movement.
“There are definite correlations with things that are going on in our town and our country,” Spence said. “There’s a point in the play where we have signs and we’re marching, and they made some of the signs relate to what’s going on.”
But there might be some themes within the play that are not so obvious.
“The obvious takeaway is that there’s a need for revolution,” Travis said. “But the not-so-obvious takeaway is the unexpected consequences that come about from an ill-thought-out revolution.”
“It’s deep stuff, but it’s with a bunch of song and dance numbers,” Spencer said with a laugh. “I think this musical is for absolutely everybody.”
