About halfway through the first act of “Urinetown,” the characters Hope Cladwell and Bobby Strong reveal their emotions and desires in “Follow Your Heart.” Their names could have been lifted from a Depression-era musical, and the song itself evokes such romantic classics of that time as “I Only Have Eyes for You.”
“We all want a world / Filled with peace and with joy,” Hope (the comic revelation Stephanie Styles) and Bobby (an effortlessly charismatic Jordan Fisher, fresh from a stint as Orpheus in “Hadestown”) sing in the Encores! revival that opened Wednesday night at New York City Center. “With plenty of water for each girl and boy,” they continue.
You see, our lovebirds, whom Fisher and Styles portray with a precisely calibrated mix of earnestness and goofiness, live in a dystopian world where water is scarce. Exacting payment for the privilege of peeing has become a profitable business for Hope’s tycoon father, Caldwell B. Cladwell (Rainn Wilson, not quite villainous enough), the head of the Urine Good Company corporation.
Bobby, on the other hand, is very much from the downtrodden side of the tracks. More specifically he’s the assistant custodian at the public toilet known as Amenity No. 9, run by the imperious Penelope Pennywise (Keala Settle, amped up to 11 as if rehearsing for Norma Desmond).
The jarring reference to a commodity perhaps more essential than peace and joy in such a lovely number confirms that the “Urinetown” team of Mark Hollmann (music and lyrics) and Greg Kotis (book and lyrics) was not just a new version of Harry Warren and Al Dubin, the bards of 1930s Warner Bros. musicals. A bespoke pastiche of a specific vintage style, “Follow Your Heart” also contains a streak of modern sarcasm and political commentary that helps explain why “Urinetown” has aged so remarkably well since its premiere a little more than a quarter of a century ago.
The show, which started life at the International New York Fringe Festival in 1999, had an Off Broadway run in the spring of 2001 and reopened on Broadway on Sept. 20 that same year. It won the Tony Awards for best book, original score and direction of a musical, and ran for two and a half years. The inclusion of “Urinetown” — an unlikely hit but nevertheless a hit — in Encores! underlines the mission drift of a series that used to be dedicated to flops and obscurities but nowadays simply “revisits the archives of American musical theater.”
In this particular case, the revisiting rehabilitates a musical that did meet an audience at the time, but still felt undervalued as a bit of a lightweight, silly lark. (That Hollmann and Kotis never had another Broadway show probably helped undermine the reputation of their one success.)
I confess to not liking “Urinetown” when I saw it way back when. Most particularly, I felt that the stream of fourth-wall-breaking jokes about musical-theater conventions — mostly courtesy of the narrator, Officer Lockstock (Greg Hildreth), and the urchin Little Sally (Pearl Scarlett Gold, an actual kid as opposed to the original Sally, Spencer Kayden, who was 33 when the show opened on Broadway) — betrayed a disdain for that form.
Last night, however, that conceit did not bother me at all. Perhaps Teddy Bergman’s exuberant production somehow softened the approach, or perhaps I felt less defensive about it.
Most important, I was struck by the craftsmanship that holds “Urinetown” together. When the score does not nod toward the Hollywood of the 1930s, it winks at the Berlin of the 1920s musicalized by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, or glances at the Paris of the 1830s as immortalized by “Les Misérables.” And of course the title brings to mind Steeltown, the setting of Marc Blitzstein’s agitprop play with music “The Cradle Will Rock,” from 1937. Like that city, “Urinetown isn’t so much a place as it is a metaphysical place,” as Little Sally puts it.
Yet musically this never feels like a patchwork showing its seams. Rather, “Urinetown” now comes across as a sui generis oddity that is more than the sum of its parts. Contributing to this re-evaluation is the Encores! orchestra, under Mary-Mitchell Campbell’s direction, as it is slightly bigger than the Broadway one (nine players as opposed to five) and beautifully fills up Bruce Coughlin’s expanded orchestrations.
But what really has changed, of course, is the context in which we watch “Urinetown.” “Gosh, I never realized large, monopolizing corporations could be such a force for good in the world,” Hope says early on, before she falls for Bobby and they both become radicalized by the injustice that surrounds them. The show anticipated a society in which our movements, including the most intimate ones, are nickeled and dimed for profit. The humiliation — or worse — awaiting those who lack the cash to use a shared bathroom hits harder. Too bad for those who are not winners in a cutthroat world.
“Don’t be the bunny,” Cladwell sings, explaining his worldview. “Don’t be the dope. Don’t be the loser.”
Admittedly, Act 2 does not have the nerve to follow through on the story’s darkest turns, even if the show does kill off a major character. Still, the return of “Urinetown” proves that the show was more than a flush in the pan.
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