How do you spell relief? Robert Hurwitt says 'Urinetown' is flush with fun and originality in a dystopian setting.

Robert Hurwitt

"Don't you think people want to be told that their way of life is unsustainable?" Officer Lockstock asks when Little Sally complains that the show is taking a pessimistic turn. "This isn't a happy musical," he explains.

Oh, but it is. "Urinetown," which opened Tuesday at the Geary Theater to close the American Conservatory Theater's season, is more than the happiest musical in town. The hilariously dystopian show about ruthless corporate power,
corrupt politics and misguided revolution in a near future of Malthusian water shortages is one of the most original new musicals in a long time. It's also the brightest, grimmest, funniest, most subversively provocative and creatively staged import since "Shockheaded Peter" filled the summer slot at ACT three years ago.

Way to go: ‘Urinetown’ caps ACT season with subversive style
'Urinetown' caps ACT season with subversive style
By Chad Jones, STAFF WRITER
'URINETOWN" takes musical theater straight into the toilet. And, oh, what a happy splash it makes.
Smart and smart alecky, fun and funny, "Urinetown" is the unlikeliest of Broadway hits with one of the worst titles of all time. But that's all part of the joke. This is a musical having its way with musicals -- deconstructing them, spoofing them, adoring them.

You enter the seedy world of "Urinetown" only to find yourself in a show that, if not as squeaky clean as "Mamma Mia!," is far less raunchy than "The Producers." Writers Greg Kotis (book, lyrics) and Mark Hollmann (music, lyrics), two whiz kids from Chicago's improv theater scene, bring a unique sensibility to "Urinetown" that makes it the smartest, freshest show to emerge from Broadway in a long time. Local audiences finally get to see what all the fuss is about as "Urinetown" begins its national tour under the auspices of San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater.

Plan a trip to 'Urinetown'

BILL PICTURE
SF Examiner

Imagine a place where just going to the bathroom, or as the British refer it, "having a slash," is the ultimate expression of your personal freedom. Well, welcome to Urinetown, the most fun you're likely to have sitting down (or standing up) all year. <a href=http://63.78.169.150/ex_files/default.jsp?story=X0703URINEw target=_blank>more</a>

Drink It Up
Audiences adore it, but is Urinetown as fresh as the hype suggests?
BY MICHAEL SCOTT MOORE

Everyone seems to agree that Urinetown has an irreverent, off-color edginess and a fondness for offending the audience almost unknown on Broadway these days. Critics have been using words like "fresh" and "original." Urinetown surprised the American musical establishment in 2001 by rising from the New York Fringe Festival to a long, Tony-winning run on Broadway, where producers are notoriously allergic to risky shows. But I think the shock and attendant hype say more about the cultural state of Manhattan -- with its islandwide gentrification, its Disneyfied Times Square -- than about the merits of Urinetown. There is, you have to admit, something plain wrong with Broadway when its freshest export is about wee-wee.

Comic relief

By MARY HOULIHAN
The Chicago Sun-Times

Success came to Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann not with a whimper but with a bang. It came via a show with the unlikeliest of names -- "Urinetown: The Musical," which took Broadway by storm in the fall of 2001. Multiple Tony Awards lurked just around the corner.

Kotis and Hollmann are not seasoned Broadway veterans, but rather two talented guys who came out of Chicago's off-Loop theater scene. No one was more surprised about the trajectory of the musical than the playwrights themselves.

Dearth of deadpan quite costly in 'Urinetown'

By MICHAEL PHILLIPS
The Chicago Tribune

No one said "Urinetown" wasn't a one-joke show. The artful goof by Chicago-trained composer/co-lyricist Mark Hollman and librettist/co-lyricist Greg Kotis gently tearing 1920s and 1930s social-protest musicals a new one, never had more than one joke in its corner.

But on Broadway, as performed under John Rando's direction by some of the best musical theater comics in the business, the show floated on a golden sea of theatrical confidence. Dumb? Dumb. But smart.

'Urinetown': No elimination without taxation

By HEDY WEISS
The Chicago Sun-Times

Watching the wild and wacky and utterly irresistible production of "Urinetown" that opened Tuesday night at the Shubert Theatre in a highly polished, superbly cast national touring company edition, I couldn't help imagining the special audience of musical theater greats I'd like to invite to see the show.

...

All of the above are unwitting contributors to "Urinetown," the smart, funny, ingenious work with the splendid Tony Award-winning score by the Chicago-bred (but longtime New York-based) team of Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis.

Chicago could have been 'Urine's' kind of town

By CHRIS JONES
The Chicago Tribune

n 1991, a tiny, now-defunct, weirdly named Chicago theater company called Cardiff Giant produced an original comedy musical about the diabolic marketing of a new brand of food. Created by a mad industrial scientist, the stuff was fatal to the gullible consumer: Eat three cans or more of it and you were dead.

...

It took a decade -- and a pivotal change of address for Little Suzy to morph into Little Sally and win a Tony Award -- for those $5 tickets to become trendy $90 Broadway ducats, for Cardiff Giant's Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann to become two of the hottest young composers and writers in the country, and for Chicago's "After Taste" to become a smash and uber-hip New York hit called "Urinetown."

A send-up proves good theater, too

By DOUGLAS J. KEATING
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Toward the end of Urinetown: The Musical, one character asks another, "What kind of musical is this?"

It's something that Tuesday evening's opening night audience well might have been wondering. Even by the time the question is asked onstage, many still may be too puzzled or dazzled by this offbeat show to offer an answer, but they will be sure of one thing: The musical playing at the Academy of Music is very smart, delightfully executed and highly entertaining.

Funny 'Urinetown' a sophisticated kind of bathroom humor

By TONY BROWN
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
January 22, 2004

Yes, it just sounds smutty and awful and stinky and gross. But "Urinetown" is the funniest and most sophisticated of a new breed of Broadway musical that elevates bad taste to the status of high art - and high hilarity.

Just closed on Broadway after 2½ years, "Urinetown" now exists only as a tour launched last year by the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. It opened a two-week run Tuesday at the Palace Theatre in downtown Cleveland's Playhouse Square.

Although it sags for a short stretch in Act 2 and the musical loses some of its intimate energy in the huge Palace, it's a first-rate road production of a great show.

'Urinetown' loses sight of theme
Superb performances wasted on musical

By DAMIEN JAQUES
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
February 11, 2004

For about 20 years, a New York revue called "Forbidden Broadway" has been an off-Broadway institution. ...

A streak of gleeful anarchy runs through the revue, accompanied by the suggestion that you are a hip insider if you get the jokes.

Putting the pee in play

By PETER CRAVEN
The Australian
April 6, 2004

THE theatre mob of Melbourne is having difficulty even saying it: Urinetown. That's the name of this crazy comedy sketch of a musical about a world where people not only have to pay to pee but are forced to do so in the public amenities owned by the blackly majestic capitalist, Calder B. Cladwell.

The Melbourne Theatre Company has assembled quite a cast for the Australian premiere.