| Issue #26, September 22, 2006 |
review: urinetown at the gateway playhouse
StHaving preconceptions is not the best way to approach any performance, especially when you are due to review it. I freely admit that I was not really looking forward to seeing this production of Urinetown that closes a wonderful summer season at Gateway Playhouse in Bellport when it has its last show on October 7th. Rightly or wrongly, I find the title to be gratuitously “yucky”and seeming to promise that sophomoric, scatologically-based humor that seems to sell so many puerile film ‘comedies’ today.
In the event, the subject was not that bad. The opening numbers are fixated on urination and revolve around the way that during a period of great drought and subsequent water shortage, “big business” now charges people exorbitant amounts of money for the privilege of performing their necessary bodily functions. The rest of the show develops the theme of this struggle between big business and the “little people,” led by one Bobby Strong, played with appropriate bravado by Timothy A. Fitz-Gerald. In the process he finds love with Hope Cladwell, the daughter of the Caldwell B. Cladwell (Broadway veteran Hal Davis), the CEO of the wicked company that controls the water supply. Christina DeCicco is pretty in an ingénue fashion and shows that she has a good voice. The problem is that there really is nothing in this show, music or acting wise, to enable the performers to display their undoubted talents. The full title of the show is Urinetown – The Musical but Mark Hollman, listed as the perpetrator of music and lyrics has really created Urinetown – The UnMusical. Rogers, Bernstein, Lorenz Hart and Hammerstein must be turning in their graves. But then, I’m unashamedly old fashioned when it comes to musicals, except for that wonderful Steven Sondheim – now there’s someone who really knows how to pen a witty biting lyric as well as composing some memorable music.
Urinetown had a long run on and off Broadway and won several Tony awards. The official website describes it as a “neo-Brechtian absurdist melodrama” but to compare this to the work of Berthold Brecht is both totally absurd and melodramatic. The show works overly hard to try and parody the styles of shows as diverse as Les Miz, Sweeney Todd and Fiddler but sometimes the parodies are hard to decipher. It also sets out to be a “social satire” but satire implies humor and there were only a few good punchlines throughout the show.
One or two numbers, such as the gospel-styled “Run Freedom Run” have some life to them but such moments are fleeting. The use of a part-time narrator and an abandoned waif to explain to the audience what is going to happen really adds nothing of value to the production. The costumes and stage setting are predictably drab and miserable and there is nothing uplifting about either. The cast all work very hard and perform their roles very well but they have so little to work with.
Reading the program notes, there is the comment that the authors of the show considered musicals a “cheesy dated art form and they challenged themselves to think of the worst concept for a show they could imagine – something like ‘Springtime for Hitler’ from The Producers would have been.” In this respect they deserve full marks, for this is certainly what they delivered! Another label attached to this show is “The little show that could;” for me it was “The little show that didn’t.”
This is a show that will not be everyone’s cup of tea (an unfortunate analogy perhaps). I accept that many people will spend the evening laughing, as a proportion of this audience did and you certainly have to give full credit to the Gateway management for taking a chance with Urinetown and for being prepared to take risks.
Looking back, this has been a great summer season of very diverse shows at Gateway. With all of them, with the exception of this show, I have been at times enthralled, entertained, saddened and happy and I have always come away reveling in their very high professional quality of casting and production that fully rivals Broadway. The next Gateway show will be their very new production of the spectacular A Christmas Carol. This is the show, originally produced by Radio City Entertainment, which so many people have enjoyed in recent years at the Theater at Madison Square Garden. This Christmas spectacular will run from December 15th until the 30th at the Patchogue Theater.
–Roy Bradbrook
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