January 19, 2023
It's Still Chanukah! Fried Maccabees/Mac & Cheeseby Randi / December 19, 2014
This is my nightmare, honestly. No exaggeration, do you know how much I pee? In the dystopian society of “Urinetown”, it is indeed ‘a privilege to pee’: You have to pay at a public utility each and every time you have to use the bathroom. Because of a 20-year drought, there are no more private bathrooms, and because it’s a dystopia, if you pee in the woods or in a bush or relieve yourself in any way (even accidents) without paying your fee, you get “sent to Urinetown”. It’s in quotes because it is indeed a euphemism for something horrible.
Who does all of that money go to? Why, obviously a private corporation! “Urinetown” was written by Mark Hollman and Greg Kotis before its first production in 2001, so these guys were Nostradamus levels of prescient. Okay maybe not Nostradamus because corporate takeover was happening then too but now it’s like crazy so this show seems even more appropriate and smart than it did back then. The superbly named Urine Good Company, run by evil mastermind Caldwell B. Cladwell (played wonderfully by British comedian Phill Jupitus), implements utility price hikes at its will, pays off all the weasely politicians to push terrible legislation through, and sends poor people who can’t pay for their morning pee off to Urinetown. He bad.
Or is he? One of the most interesting aspects of this show is how they blur all the lines distinguishing between the good guys and the bad guys. Cladwell may be a mean man responsible for lots of deaths, but his public bathroom system exists for a reason: There is extremely little water in the ground, and it has to be regulated. If toilet usage went up too much, the fragile water supply would be destroyed, hence his price hikes and strict rules for using the utilities. Now sure, people should still be able to pee in bushes without causing serious damage, but I didn’t see any shrubbery. Also, it would smell. Cladwell prides himself on keeping water in the ground and pee off the street.
Adding to the horror of this society is that no one actually knows what Urinetown is, except for apparently two policemen, who take victims there, and Cladwell, who invented it. The public assumes it’s a terrible sort of exile, a place even worse than the town we see, but it’s more than that. I feel I shouldn’t say.
One of the cops is also the narrator. He’s pretty funny and scary at the same time, but I got distracted by how strangely he pronounced some words in his attempt to turn his British accent into an American accent and then into a New York accent. People, there is no reason for this show to be American. The whole world is suffering and drying up in this show, so if they wanted it to be British they could have and then I wouldn’t have been distracted by accent issues. Of course, then it wouldn’t make sense when Cladwell talks about how much money he spent on his daughter’s college education; that’s an American thing.
His daughter is Hope Cladwell, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young girl who wants everyone to be happy!!! and who expects to take over her father’s company before her eyes are opened to the world of poverty and anguish that he is extorting. She falls in love with a young man, Bobby Strong, who works in one of the poorest public utilities, and Bobby shows her the real world and how awful it is. Together, along with a rag tag group of povers who look like zombies, they resolve to bring down Urine Good Company and let everybody pee for free! Yay! Peeing for free is the dream. I guess that’s another reason they didn’t set it in Britain – there are so many ‘public’ bathrooms that you actually have to pay for here*. Already. It’s starting.
*In fact, Greg Kotis got the idea for “Urinetown” when he was traveling through Europe and encountered all the pay toilets. How scary is that! It really is real.
Bobby is played by Matthew Seadon-Young, and he’s fantastic. He looks kind of like Superman but wearing his Clark Kent glasses. He sings really well and dances so furiously that an extended applause break was pretty much just to let him catch his breath. That extended applause came during the best number, “Run Freedom Run”, which kind of sounds like peeing yourself. It’s the most fun song in the show, done in a spiritual fashion, when the whole chorus gets to shine.
All the songs in this score, which won a Tony, have a clear purpose. I don’t remember thinking ‘they should have cut this’ at any point, meaning I wasn’t bored. The score is fun because all the songs are so different. You have the aforementioned high-pace spiritual. You have the lovely love song ‘Follow Your Heart’, with Bobby and Hope (a clear-voiced Rosanna Hyland) professing their love for each other, which made me think of the Love Theme from “The Hurt Locker: The Musical” (look it up). You have the dark and scary poor-chorus numbers ‘It’s a Privilege to Pee’ and ‘What is Urinetown’, the comic and ridiculous ‘Don’t be the Bunny’ by Cladwell, and more. None sounds like the other, or like anything else, and that is huge. The songs are much simpler than Sondheim, but it reminded me of his style because you don’t leave humming any easy melodies. There are no easy melodies here.
The book is structured as a look back on these sad times, with Officer Lockstock (not to be confused by his partner in fighting crime and committing crimes, Officer Barrel — GET IT?!) also acting as the narrator of this sad story. Little Sally, the most likable character in the show, is a poor spunky Annie-type girl who keeps asking Officer Lockstock why everything is so depressing and sad when this is a musical! And he responds that it’s not a happy musical. And Little Sally will say “But it’s still a musical!!” Karis Jack is fantastic here, in her West End debut. Lockstock is pretty good too but needs to work on the accent.
Obviously you root for the poor ‘good’ people against the evil corporation, and you are glad when the fighting is over and they come out on top. (Except for some of our main characters, who shockingly get sent to Urinetown. Not expected!) But more of this show’s twisted brilliance comes through in the epilogue. You had to pay for a reason, remember? There’s barely any water left. And without regulation, Hope’s new system of do what makes you happy!!! dries up everything pretty fast, resulting in a world that is, if possible, worse than what it was under corporate control. At least there was control there. That’s when they all realize that Urinetown, the horrible tortuous place they thought criminals (unpaying pee-ers) were exiled to, was actually where they lived now. They brought it upon themselves. (Also, Urinetown wasn’t that kind of exile, you learn in Act II. The truth is pretty grim.) It’s pretty freaking dark, right! Yet it’s so funny and enjoyable. This show is like a comedic “Sweeney Todd”. So much death, so much tragedy, and you laugh way too much. Definitely a must-see before it prematurely closes in a month. Anyway I have to go pee now. FOR FREE.
Adding to the horror of this society is that no one actually knows what Urinetown is, except for apparently two policemen, who take victims there, and Cladwell, who invented it. The public assumes it’s a terrible sort of exile, a place even worse than the town we see, but it’s more than that. I feel I shouldn’t say.
One of the cops is also the narrator. He’s pretty funny and scary at the same time, but I got distracted by how strangely he pronounced some words in his attempt to turn his British accent into an American accent and then into a New York accent. People, there is no reason for this show to be American. The whole world is suffering and drying up in this show, so if they wanted it to be British they could have and then I wouldn’t have been distracted by accent issues. Of course, then it wouldn’t make sense when Cladwell talks about how much money he spent on his daughter’s college education; that’s an American thing.
His daughter is Hope Cladwell, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young girl who wants everyone to be happy!!! and who expects to take over her father’s company before her eyes are opened to the world of poverty and anguish that he is extorting. She falls in love with a young man, Bobby Strong, who works in one of the poorest public utilities, and Bobby shows her the real world and how awful it is. Together, along with a rag tag group of povers who look like zombies, they resolve to bring down Urine Good Company and let everybody pee for free! Yay! Peeing for free is the dream. I guess that’s another reason they didn’t set it in Britain – there are so many ‘public’ bathrooms that you actually have to pay for here*. Already. It’s starting.
*In fact, Greg Kotis got the idea for “Urinetown” when he was traveling through Europe and encountered all the pay toilets. How scary is that! It really is real.
Bobby is played by Matthew Seadon-Young, and he’s fantastic. He looks kind of like Superman but wearing his Clark Kent glasses. He sings really well and dances so furiously that an extended applause break was pretty much just to let him catch his breath. That extended applause came during the best number, “Run Freedom Run”, which kind of sounds like peeing yourself. It’s the most fun song in the show, done in a spiritual fashion, when the whole chorus gets to shine.
All the songs in this score, which won a Tony, have a clear purpose. I don’t remember thinking ‘they should have cut this’ at any point, meaning I wasn’t bored. The score is fun because all the songs are so different. You have the aforementioned high-pace spiritual. You have the lovely love song ‘Follow Your Heart’, with Bobby and Hope (a clear-voiced Rosanna Hyland) professing their love for each other, which made me think of the Love Theme from “The Hurt Locker: The Musical” (look it up). You have the dark and scary poor-chorus numbers ‘It’s a Privilege to Pee’ and ‘What is Urinetown’, the comic and ridiculous ‘Don’t be the Bunny’ by Cladwell, and more. None sounds like the other, or like anything else, and that is huge. The songs are much simpler than Sondheim, but it reminded me of his style because you don’t leave humming any easy melodies. There are no easy melodies here.
The book is structured as a look back on these sad times, with Officer Lockstock (not to be confused by his partner in fighting crime and committing crimes, Officer Barrel — GET IT?!) also acting as the narrator of this sad story. Little Sally, the most likable character in the show, is a poor spunky Annie-type girl who keeps asking Officer Lockstock why everything is so depressing and sad when this is a musical! And he responds that it’s not a happy musical. And Little Sally will say “But it’s still a musical!!” Karis Jack is fantastic here, in her West End debut. Lockstock is pretty good too but needs to work on the accent.
Obviously you root for the poor ‘good’ people against the evil corporation, and you are glad when the fighting is over and they come out on top. (Except for some of our main characters, who shockingly get sent to Urinetown. Not expected!) But more of this show’s twisted brilliance comes through in the epilogue. You had to pay for a reason, remember? There’s barely any water left. And without regulation, Hope’s new system of do what makes you happy!!! dries up everything pretty fast, resulting in a world that is, if possible, worse than what it was under corporate control. At least there was control there. That’s when they all realize that Urinetown, the horrible tortuous place they thought criminals (unpaying pee-ers) were exiled to, was actually where they lived now. They brought it upon themselves. (Also, Urinetown wasn’t that kind of exile, you learn in Act II. The truth is pretty grim.) It’s pretty freaking dark, right! Yet it’s so funny and enjoyable. This show is like a comedic “Sweeney Todd”. So much death, so much tragedy, and you laugh way too much. Definitely a must-see before it prematurely closes in a month. Anyway I have to go pee now. FOR FREE.
Related Posts
Thoughts on: Far From Heaven, Off-Broadway
The sold-out run of Far From Heaven at Playwrights Horizons promised a more epic experience that the one I actually had. It starred the magnificent Kelli O’Hara, was written by the musical team from Grey Gardens, was based on the 2002 Oscar-nominated movie starring Julianne Moore. I paid more than I ever have for a Broadway ticket, and I expected to be astonished. Aside from getting to listen to O’Hara’s beautiful voice live, I was actually disappointed.
The show put forth a solid effort, but it felt like a house constructed without a foundation. Considering how miraculously affecting much of the Grey Gardens music was, I expected at least one song to make me feel something. Instead, I felt less than I do while watching episodes from season 2 of New Girl. And that shouldn’t be close to the case for a show about a woman, mother, wife in the 1950s dealing with her homosexual, philandering husband and her own surprising romantic feelings for her black gardener. I know! It’s all there, waiting to be interpreted and transcended, and yet the opportunity was squandered. This show deals with pretty much the most serious dramatic ploys possible – all of them! – yet doesn’t deliver emotionally. There has to be a really big disconnect among the creators for something like that to happen.
The show put forth a solid effort, but it felt like a house constructed without a foundation. Considering how miraculously affecting much of the Grey Gardens music was, I expected at least one song to make me feel something. Instead, I felt less than I do while watching episodes from season 2 of New Girl. And that shouldn’t be close to the case for a show about a woman, mother, wife in the 1950s dealing with her homosexual, philandering husband and her own surprising romantic feelings for her black gardener. I know! It’s all there, waiting to be interpreted and transcended, and yet the opportunity was squandered. This show deals with pretty much the most serious dramatic ploys possible – all of them! – yet doesn’t deliver emotionally. There has to be a really big disconnect among the creators for something like that to happen.
I would love for this show to move to Broadway, but only if it undergoes serious reworking. Several new songs that better fit O’Hara’s talents are necessary. Although she always manages to be good, even in things like Nice Work If You Can Get It, her voice is not one that you let sit there on run-of-the-mill, generic, straightforward songs. Let her shine! Christine Ebersole’s performance of “Another Winter In A Summer Town”, from Grey Gardens, gives me chills just thinking about. O’Hara, just as capable of producing such a performance, was given no such opportunity.
The songs need to be rewritten, plain and simple. The book needs editing too, as I saw way too much of Cathy’s (O’Hara) husband’s office, and not enough of Cathy’s best friend’s seeming understanding yet complete and utter disapproval. I also didn’t understand the casting of Steve Pasquale as the husband. Maybe it was because I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Diction, people!
I didn’t actively dislike the show, but I didn’t actively feel anything, which is a huge problem. Plays happen up on that stage in order to make you, the audience, feel something, and I felt nothing. I just wanted to badly for it to be the event I was hoping for. With any luck, severe changes will be made and the show will be entirely transformed when (if) it goes to Broadway. I sincerely hope this happens, because everyone involved deserves better.
The songs need to be rewritten, plain and simple. The book needs editing too, as I saw way too much of Cathy’s (O’Hara) husband’s office, and not enough of Cathy’s best friend’s seeming understanding yet complete and utter disapproval. I also didn’t understand the casting of Steve Pasquale as the husband. Maybe it was because I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Diction, people!
I didn’t actively dislike the show, but I didn’t actively feel anything, which is a huge problem. Plays happen up on that stage in order to make you, the audience, feel something, and I felt nothing. I just wanted to badly for it to be the event I was hoping for. With any luck, severe changes will be made and the show will be entirely transformed when (if) it goes to Broadway. I sincerely hope this happens, because everyone involved deserves better.
“Macbeth” at the Royal Shakespeare Company: Stop Trying to Modernize Billy and Just Let the Genius Be
IT’S THEATRE THURSDAY! Today we are talking about ‘Macbeth’ at the Royal Shakespeare Company Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon. I KNOW!
To celebrate Jesus’s zombification this past week, my family took a wee little trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon, the birthplace of that other influential man, William Shakespeare, or as I call him endearingly, Billy Shakes. We visited the wee little house where he was born and grew up, and the not so wee cottage where his future wife, Anne Hathaway (not that one) grew up down the road, as well as the truly authentic Ye Olde Souvenir Shop of yore where my mom could buy magnets of Meghan Markle. But that’s all for a different post. Today is Theatre Thursday, and so we will talk about the most exciting thing to me about visiting Stratford – seeing a performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Our dates coincided with their performance of Macbeth, which despite reading a lot and knowing in various inspired-by forms, I’ve never seen performed as written. Exciting! Guess what, Macbeth is forked up. Like reals forked up. It’s so gory and troubling and violent and creepy. That Billy tho.
To celebrate Jesus’s zombification this past week, my family took a wee little trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon, the birthplace of that other influential man, William Shakespeare, or as I call him endearingly, Billy Shakes. We visited the wee little house where he was born and grew up, and the not so wee cottage where his future wife, Anne Hathaway (not that one) grew up down the road, as well as the truly authentic Ye Olde Souvenir Shop of yore where my mom could buy magnets of Meghan Markle. But that’s all for a different post. Today is Theatre Thursday, and so we will talk about the most exciting thing to me about visiting Stratford – seeing a performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Our dates coincided with their performance of Macbeth, which despite reading a lot and knowing in various inspired-by forms, I’ve never seen performed as written. Exciting! Guess what, Macbeth is forked up. Like reals forked up. It’s so gory and troubling and violent and creepy. That Billy tho.
If you don’t know, Macbeth tells the story of this guy named Macbeth who is close to the king and calls everyone cousin and his wife is cray and he is visited by three prophetic witches who tell him that he will become king while reciting names of Olsen Twins direct-to-video movies. Macbeth is like okay I guess I’ll kill the king so I can become king, even though he’s not next in line of succession but bully for him, the king’s children flee, wisely assuming that whoever killed the king will likely go after them, the princes. Macbeth becomes all consumed by murderous ambition and keeps killing anyone who might figure out his evil deeds or get in his way and it’s prettayyy prettayyy scary. He kills or orders to be killed guards and waitstaff and his best friend and poor Macduff’s entire family, even the little baby (and, in this production, the wife was pregnant again). He’s a bad guy. And his wife is a bad lady. At first she talks shit about how they should totally kill whoever they need to in order to rule Scotland, no big deal what a good plan, but she also makes passing comments about how she would happily kill babies if they were suckling at her breast and you’re like wait what, the fuck did you just say? So a lot of Shakespeare scholars think that she’s probably killed babies that she had and didn’t want, which is a whole other thing we don’t need to talk about, but suffice it to say that she starts out at a pretty high level of evil and doesn’t have far to go in order to become completely crayballs bananapants real quick.
This production of Macbeth attempted to modernize it just a wee little bit, by performing the original text (I mean thank god; no one coming to the RSC wants to hear anything but the original text) but with the actors dressed in modern attire: gowns at the dinners, regular suits, and the kingsmen and army people wearing camo and bulletproof vests during battle scenes. It was unnecessary. I understand the desire to put your own stamp on a production of a play that has been performed innumerable times, but there’s no need to update Shakespeare. I mean it’s Shakespeare. It’s been performed a billion trillion times because it is pretty solid as is. And if you are going to try to modernize it, changing up the costumes is a half-assed attempt that really isn’t going to cut it. Go big or stick to what’s foolproof. But don’t go big if you are the Royal Shakespeare Company because people are coming to see og Shakespeare, you know? Just do it og. The few set pieces were also modern: desk chairs, dinner set, water cooler, &c. I don’t actually get the water cooler bit, because that and a few waiting-room style chairs made an area look like, well, a hospital waiting room, and at first I thought it was going to be directed to make it look like all the action was just inside a deranged person’s head, and I was all ‘hey I liked this better when it starred Alan Cumming on Broadway’ and while there are indeed two deranged persons onstage, there was never anything hinting at it being a mental patient’s hallucination or anything like that.
But forget everything I’ve said so far. Really, the only thing you need to know was that they had the witches portrayed by three little girls in pajamas and slippers carrying creepy baby dolls and it was the CREEPIEST FORKING THING YOU’VE EVER SEEN. Like, the witches are already scary. Little girls in horror movies are the scariest things. And baby dolls of the sort they were carrying are beyond terrifying. You put them all together and what do you get, the most bloodcurdling rendition of the witches in the history of time. NOT OKAY. NOT APPROVED. Their tiny little voices in unison will give me nightmares for years.
A big other directing decision that I understand but highly disapprove of was the use of a digital timer right in the middle of the stage, counting down two hours from when Macbeth kills the king until Macbeth himself dies (do we need spoiler warnings? you’ve had 400 years). It’s saying something lofty about how we have limited time and everything is a matter of time and time is of the essence or WHATEVER but all I could think was how on earth did that entire scene take only 4 minutes? what time do you think it stops at for intermission? is it going to keep running through intermission or do I really have an hour and 40 minutes left? wait what just happened I was too busy watching the seconds tick? So, yeah, it was incredibly distracting and everyone I was with and everyone we spoke to at intermission agreed that it was too distracting for what it was worth. It made the play seem longer than it is and it took me out of it. It’s hard enough to understand the Elizabethan language without having your attention spar with a distracting clock.
The first act did drag a big even aside from the timer situation. Maybe because there wasn’t enough of Lady Macbeth, as the actress playing her, Niamh Cusack, was the strongest in the cast. Maybe my wee little brain just needed the time to acclimate to the language; it’s been a while since my last Shakespearean outing. Also I was counting the minutes (well, tracking via the timer) until I could yell at my dad for whispering. Also the person behind us was super sick and coughing the entire time and I couldn’t wait until the lights came up and I could say ‘hey did you mean to go to the hospital because you went to the wrong place.’ The second act was much more captivating as all the shit went to shit and as you felt the comeuppance of our leading evildoers getting closer and closer. You really wanted them to get comeupped; they’re REALLY bad people. I thought the actor playing Macduff, Edward Bennett, did a fantastic job with his scene when he finds out about his family. What he did by simply repeating the word ‘all’ over and over with clearly changing emotions and realizations was quite moving. And our leading man, Christopher Eccleston, was no slouch either. He did seem to be ramped up the entire time, with a Macbeth that operated at or above a certain level of intensity and never dipped below it, so I was kind of like ahh chill dude the whole time, but I suppose that Macbeth never should dip below a high level of intensity anyway so it was a good performance. It’s just so hard to watch this show with anything other than a cringey feeling of ‘ahhh just someone anyone please kill these monsters already!’ Which they do, yayy.
The best part of this production was honestly the actor playing the porter. Michael Hodgson could have easily been a character in Beetlejuice, or maybe Addams Family Values, with his creepy but hilarious manner and his deadpan, matter-of-fact delivery. He was seated onstage (near the water cooler) pretty much the whole time, so he was almost an all-knowing character. I loved when he was eating a little snack pack of something while talking to some murderers, and one of them snatched it out of his hand, and he just pulled out another little pack from his pocket. I love when someone came out looking for Macbeth, who was cowering in a corner, and the porter pointed over to him. But the best was his subtle tracking of Macbeth’s victims, by drawing chalk tallies on the brick wall at the back. Well, it was subtle in Act I. In Act II, he spends most of his time tallying up all the deaths, I imagine to come, as the battles get under way. Hundreds and hundreds of chalk marks cover the walls in a pretty dramatically effective use of the porter’s time, though not as fun as when he was talking.
As I said, I haven’t seen a different straight production, so I’m not sure if our ending was special or regular, but it did seem special. Maybe it’s because I just saw a production of Pippin where they use what’s called the ‘Theo ending’, where the little boy playing the little boy actor playing Theo comes back onstage after the regular ending and hints to the audience that maybe one day he would be ready to take Pippin’s place. It’s really disturbing and it works really well. Here, they did a similar thing that made me think of the Theo ending, something I’ll call the Fleance ending because oh my god, that name. So one of the witches’ prophesies was that Banquo’s heirs would inherit the throne after Macbeth is king, yet after Macbeth’s death, og King Duncan’s eldest son, Malcolm, is rightfully crowned. So when does Banquo’s son Fleance get in on that to fulfill the prophesy? Usually audiences just assume that at some point, the crown falls to him and his line. Here, however, Fleance comes onstage while Malcolm is being crowned, and stares at him, and then draws his sword menacingly. Hella spine-chilling, especially from someone named Fleance.
All in all, it was a very solid production, acting-wise. All the stuff that’s supposed to be in there – the text, the acting, the ability to be creative with stage directions like that ending – was good. It was the unnecessary bits – the modern costumes, the modern ‘setting’ that was half-assed, the gd m*f*ing timer that should have been cut from day 1 of rehearsals – that was extraneous and hurt the production, I feel. Yet there’s only so much damage you can do to a show like this, so overall I still enjoyed it verily.
AUDIENCE
Ugh that person coughing behind us was really annoying. It was like nonstop. Also I still can’t believe my dad was the one talking. Otherwise it was fine I think! I guess people who go to Shakespeare don’t need to check their phones every ten minutes.
THEATRE
The toilets for the mezzanine/dress circle NEVER had a line! It was epic! So well designed. I can’t say for the stalls.
It’s about 2 hours and 20 minutes with intermission, so it’s a pretty short show, actually. One of the ushers told me, when I asked about the length, ‘Oh we love Macbeth! It’s so short!’
