"The view which [the Author] has given of human life has a melancholy hue, but he feels conscious that he has drawn these dark tints from a conviction that they are really in the picture, and not from a jaundiced eye or an inherent spleen of disposition. The theory of mind which he has sketched in the two last chapters accounts to his own understanding in a satisfactory manner for the existence of most of the evils of life, but whether it will have the same effect upon others must be left to the judgment of his readers."
-- Thomas Malthus, preface to "An Essay on the Principle of Population"
Urinetown is really about one central theme -- Control.
As the show begins, Cladwell is in control. And he preserves and exercises that control in a way very familiar to those of us living in the Bush era -- secrets, lies, and fear. Urinetown is a cautionary tale about investing too much power (i.e., control) in the hands of the few. Just as our Congress has allowed George W. Bush too much unchecked power, so too does the Legislature in Urinetown give Cladwell free reign. The bribes Cladwell offers to Senator Fipp now seem like a direct, conscious commentary on the recent Jack Abramoff bribery scandal and the conviction of Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham for accepting bribes. And the idea in Urinetown that the government keeps detailed records on when these poor folks pee, and whether or not they've "been regular" (i.e., not sneaking illegal pees), smacks of our real government's nosing into our library records, listening to our phone calls, registering us when we buy cold medicine, installing cameras in intersections, and so much more. Urinetown shows us a Worst Case Scenario, but in many ways, that scenario is already real.
The coolest part is that Urinetown was written before any of that real world stuff happened. The scariest part is that in Urinetown the bad guys are ultimately right -- they were doing it all for our own good...!
So where does that leave us? And where does that leave the wags who think musicals are all frothy, light-hearted escapist fare?
I guess I learned back in 1999 when we produced Camelot during the Monica Lewinsky mess -- politics never really changes that much, so most political stories on stage will always be timeless and universal. The only difference is that, in the world of the theatre, politicians always get what's coming to them...
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
I See a River
"It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out where the strong man stumbled, or where the doers of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who in the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who knew neither victory or defeat." -- Theodore Roosevelt
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
The Anthem of the People
I'd like to give a big musical theatre Shout Out to my Urinators! You Rock!
This is the hardest working cast in show business, I shit you not. We had our music review tonight, going back over the whole score, fixing any problems, smoothing over rough spots, just making sure everything's clicking before we go forward and put this thing on its feet. And by God, these amazing performers really know what they're doing! When the big dramatic group sections come up, these sixteen voices sound like a choir of forty! They have been working their asses off these first two weeks and it has paid off. 'Cause this is the hardest damn score I've worked on since Sweeney Todd.
And did I mention it's hard?
Numbers like the Act I finale and "Why Did I Listen to That Man?" are essentially gigantic operatic counterpoint numbers -- in the language of Broadway pop and German agitprop (like Threepenny), but fully operatic in form, with rich, thick harmonies, beautifully wrought counterpoint, and big, thrilling climaxes. It's a complete blast to play (though the piano part is hard too!), and it's even more of a blast to sing. I'm gonna miss playing this stuff once I hand it off to our pianist and conductor Chris Petersen.
And my favorite part -- so much of this music is really funny! There are musical jokes and references everywhere. It's a rare theatre score whose music is actually funny (Bat Boy is another example of very few), even independent of its lyrics... which are also incredibly funny.
What's so much fun about the score is that it mocks itself constantly. The music mocks itself in the self-important movie melodrama of the Ooo's behind Sally's melody in "Tell Her I Love Her," the notated huffing and puffing between the final phrases of "Why Did I Listen to That Man?", the coitus interruptus of several songs' endings -- but it's also extremely high quality, sophisticated music, even by "serious" standards.
And the lyrics aren't just funny, they literally mock lyrics and even mock rhyming! So often, the lyrics careen into extended multiple rhymes, but with each successive rhyme, the actual meaning of the words gets more and more bizarre, consciously abandoning sense for rhyme -- playfully making a mockery of the acrobatic rhyming in the theatre lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, Yip Harburg, Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and others. And yet, at the same time, the lyrics are so skillfully built, so easy to sing, melded to the music so seemingly effortlessly. Hollman and Kotis aren't just smartass comedians; they are also supremely talented theatre writers.
I am the luckiest fucker on the planet. I get to do shows like Urinetown and I never have to worry about them being "commercial." Our theatre only seats 150 (at the most), and all our shows are budgeted to lose money (offset by grants and contributions), so we never have to worry about what mainstream audiences will like or hate, be offended by, or just not understand. We get to make relatively pure theatre. I get to live my life inside great works of art like Sunday in the Park with George, Floyd Collins, Bat Boy, Passion, and now, Urinetown. Don't let its smartass posture fool you -- this is a true work of art, a piece so honest and so well crafted that working on it is both incredibly joyful and also deeply humbling.
God, I love my job.
Now if I could just pay my rent...
Long Live the Musicals!
Scott
This is the hardest working cast in show business, I shit you not. We had our music review tonight, going back over the whole score, fixing any problems, smoothing over rough spots, just making sure everything's clicking before we go forward and put this thing on its feet. And by God, these amazing performers really know what they're doing! When the big dramatic group sections come up, these sixteen voices sound like a choir of forty! They have been working their asses off these first two weeks and it has paid off. 'Cause this is the hardest damn score I've worked on since Sweeney Todd.
And did I mention it's hard?
Numbers like the Act I finale and "Why Did I Listen to That Man?" are essentially gigantic operatic counterpoint numbers -- in the language of Broadway pop and German agitprop (like Threepenny), but fully operatic in form, with rich, thick harmonies, beautifully wrought counterpoint, and big, thrilling climaxes. It's a complete blast to play (though the piano part is hard too!), and it's even more of a blast to sing. I'm gonna miss playing this stuff once I hand it off to our pianist and conductor Chris Petersen.
And my favorite part -- so much of this music is really funny! There are musical jokes and references everywhere. It's a rare theatre score whose music is actually funny (Bat Boy is another example of very few), even independent of its lyrics... which are also incredibly funny.
What's so much fun about the score is that it mocks itself constantly. The music mocks itself in the self-important movie melodrama of the Ooo's behind Sally's melody in "Tell Her I Love Her," the notated huffing and puffing between the final phrases of "Why Did I Listen to That Man?", the coitus interruptus of several songs' endings -- but it's also extremely high quality, sophisticated music, even by "serious" standards.
And the lyrics aren't just funny, they literally mock lyrics and even mock rhyming! So often, the lyrics careen into extended multiple rhymes, but with each successive rhyme, the actual meaning of the words gets more and more bizarre, consciously abandoning sense for rhyme -- playfully making a mockery of the acrobatic rhyming in the theatre lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, Yip Harburg, Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and others. And yet, at the same time, the lyrics are so skillfully built, so easy to sing, melded to the music so seemingly effortlessly. Hollman and Kotis aren't just smartass comedians; they are also supremely talented theatre writers.
I am the luckiest fucker on the planet. I get to do shows like Urinetown and I never have to worry about them being "commercial." Our theatre only seats 150 (at the most), and all our shows are budgeted to lose money (offset by grants and contributions), so we never have to worry about what mainstream audiences will like or hate, be offended by, or just not understand. We get to make relatively pure theatre. I get to live my life inside great works of art like Sunday in the Park with George, Floyd Collins, Bat Boy, Passion, and now, Urinetown. Don't let its smartass posture fool you -- this is a true work of art, a piece so honest and so well crafted that working on it is both incredibly joyful and also deeply humbling.
God, I love my job.
Now if I could just pay my rent...
Long Live the Musicals!
Scott
Sing of Today!
Okay, let's get something straight. I saw Urinetown in New York. I've seen it several times on bootleg video (Shh! Don't tell anybody!). I saw it at the Rep's off-ramp series. I've been playing through the score for the last couple weeks. I know this show as well as anyone could without having worked on it...
And yet I had no idea -- no idea, I tell ya! -- how HARD this fucking music is! Jesus Christ! No really, Jesus Christ! Luckily, we have a dynamite cast and they're handling it valiantly. Even after only one rehearsal, they sound great. But Jesus Christ!
Over our past sixteen seasons, we've produced Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Floyd Collins, Songs for a New World, Bat Boy... In other words, we've tackled some of the hardest, most ambitious scores the musical theatre has to offer, and yet still this score scares me a bit!
On the other hand, the score also contains some of the best vocal writing I've ever encountered in my life -- gorgeous harmonic part writing, thrilling counterpoint -- the kind of vocal writing that, once you've learned it, reveals how utterly perfect it is, how exactly right every note is. I can tell now that once the actors are comfortable with the choral work (which appears in almost every song in the show!), they're going to have a Serious Fucking Blast singing it every night...
We all thought singing "Comfort and Joy" in Bat Boy was about as close to heaven as musical theatre gets, but now we've got "Run, Freedom, Run"...
All I can say is Wow!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
And yet I had no idea -- no idea, I tell ya! -- how HARD this fucking music is! Jesus Christ! No really, Jesus Christ! Luckily, we have a dynamite cast and they're handling it valiantly. Even after only one rehearsal, they sound great. But Jesus Christ!
Over our past sixteen seasons, we've produced Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Floyd Collins, Songs for a New World, Bat Boy... In other words, we've tackled some of the hardest, most ambitious scores the musical theatre has to offer, and yet still this score scares me a bit!
On the other hand, the score also contains some of the best vocal writing I've ever encountered in my life -- gorgeous harmonic part writing, thrilling counterpoint -- the kind of vocal writing that, once you've learned it, reveals how utterly perfect it is, how exactly right every note is. I can tell now that once the actors are comfortable with the choral work (which appears in almost every song in the show!), they're going to have a Serious Fucking Blast singing it every night...
We all thought singing "Comfort and Joy" in Bat Boy was about as close to heaven as musical theatre gets, but now we've got "Run, Freedom, Run"...
All I can say is Wow!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
This is Urinetown!
On Monday, we start rehearsals for Urinetown, and so I continue my blog, assuming somebody somewhere is actually reading these ramblings o' mine...
I first saw Urinetown in New York, shortly after it moved to Broadway, and just a month or so after the 9/11 attacks that forced most Broadway and off Broadway shows to close prematurely (including my beloved Bat Boy). It truly was like nothing I had ever seen -- as Brechtian (i.e., in the style of legendary political playwright and director Bertolt Brecht) as Threepenny Opera and Sweeney Todd, as angry as Assassins and The Cradle Will Rock, as hilarious as Bat Boy (though not as big-hearted), as bizarre as Anyone Can Whistle. I knew, leaving the theatre that night, that I just had to work on this show!
And now my time has come. God help us all.
Urinetown is intensely, aggressively, relentlessly Silly, and yet its surface style is also its central joke -- seemingly taking its premise and characters so deadly Serious (something that some subsequent productions haven't understood). The trick is for the actors to never "wink" at the audience, to never acknowledge that the whole thing is just a big, sophomoric joke. And then, just when you least expect it, the show ends with a pretty sobering message about human nature and the environment. You leave the theatre hoarse from laughing and also strangely disturbed...
Urinetown is one of a crop of new, post-modern musicals, self-referential, deeply ironic, trading in the Ironic Detachment that now pervades our culture, both silly and smart, trivial and profound at the same time, in a category with The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Bat Boy, and Avenue Q, among others. (For more about the show, read co-author Greg Kotis' article "Urinetown Confidential," from the Feb. 2003 issue of American Theatre magazine, and/or visit New Line's Urinetown webpage.)
It always delights me when people talk about a musical as "a New Line show," when I'm reminded that we have such a clear and strong identity, that our work has become its own category. Urinetown is certainly a New Line show, right alongside Bat Boy, A New Brain, The Robber Bridegroom, Chicago, Floyd Collins, Grease, Reefer Madness, The Cradle Will Rock, The Nervous Set, and lots of others.
This will be our last show at the ArtLoft Theatre, the funky blackbox space downtown that we've been working in since spring of 2001 (we're moving to the new Ivory Theatre in the fall), and it's the perfect way to go out in a Big Blaze of Crazy. Other companies do more polished, more expensive musical theatre than we do, but nobody does Crazy better than us. Or Aggressive. They don't call us the Bad Boy of Musical Theatre for nothin'. Over our sixteen years of existence, we've developed an intense, fearless, totally rowdy style of musical theatre that (as far as I know) belongs to us alone.
It almost seems as if Urinetown was written just for New Line. This is going to be one hell of a ride, and we've got one hell of a cast.
I can't wait to get started.
I'll keep you posted...
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
I first saw Urinetown in New York, shortly after it moved to Broadway, and just a month or so after the 9/11 attacks that forced most Broadway and off Broadway shows to close prematurely (including my beloved Bat Boy). It truly was like nothing I had ever seen -- as Brechtian (i.e., in the style of legendary political playwright and director Bertolt Brecht) as Threepenny Opera and Sweeney Todd, as angry as Assassins and The Cradle Will Rock, as hilarious as Bat Boy (though not as big-hearted), as bizarre as Anyone Can Whistle. I knew, leaving the theatre that night, that I just had to work on this show!
And now my time has come. God help us all.
Urinetown is intensely, aggressively, relentlessly Silly, and yet its surface style is also its central joke -- seemingly taking its premise and characters so deadly Serious (something that some subsequent productions haven't understood). The trick is for the actors to never "wink" at the audience, to never acknowledge that the whole thing is just a big, sophomoric joke. And then, just when you least expect it, the show ends with a pretty sobering message about human nature and the environment. You leave the theatre hoarse from laughing and also strangely disturbed...
Urinetown is one of a crop of new, post-modern musicals, self-referential, deeply ironic, trading in the Ironic Detachment that now pervades our culture, both silly and smart, trivial and profound at the same time, in a category with The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Bat Boy, and Avenue Q, among others. (For more about the show, read co-author Greg Kotis' article "Urinetown Confidential," from the Feb. 2003 issue of American Theatre magazine, and/or visit New Line's Urinetown webpage.)
It always delights me when people talk about a musical as "a New Line show," when I'm reminded that we have such a clear and strong identity, that our work has become its own category. Urinetown is certainly a New Line show, right alongside Bat Boy, A New Brain, The Robber Bridegroom, Chicago, Floyd Collins, Grease, Reefer Madness, The Cradle Will Rock, The Nervous Set, and lots of others.
This will be our last show at the ArtLoft Theatre, the funky blackbox space downtown that we've been working in since spring of 2001 (we're moving to the new Ivory Theatre in the fall), and it's the perfect way to go out in a Big Blaze of Crazy. Other companies do more polished, more expensive musical theatre than we do, but nobody does Crazy better than us. Or Aggressive. They don't call us the Bad Boy of Musical Theatre for nothin'. Over our sixteen years of existence, we've developed an intense, fearless, totally rowdy style of musical theatre that (as far as I know) belongs to us alone.
It almost seems as if Urinetown was written just for New Line. This is going to be one hell of a ride, and we've got one hell of a cast.
I can't wait to get started.
I'll keep you posted...
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
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