Review: “Urinetown” is a royal flush in performance, wit and timeliness

Atlanta’s first truly must-see, 10-out-of-10 production of 2023 has arrived via the uproarious Actor’s Express/Oglethorpe University Theatre staging of the Tony-winning anti-capitalist musical satire Urinetown: The Musical, which runs at Oglethorpe’s Conant Performing Arts Center through February 19.

The story centers on a dystopic but not too terribly distant future when decades of water shortages (referred to by various characters as “The Stink Years”) have led to one monopolistic company wielding all the power over who gets to use their private toilets. The Urine Good Company (this show is no stranger to a good pun), led by megalomaniacal baddie Caldwell B. Cladwell (played with gleeful vigor by Atlanta stage veteran Jeff McKerley), has bought off politicians and law enforcement to wield all-encompassing power.

Anyone who breaks the company’s stringent laws about where and when to pee, or doesn’t have enough money to pay to pee, gets carted off to a place called Urinetown —  from whence no one, ominously, ever returns.

If massive companies wielding obscene amounts of power to influence the actions of those in higher office sounds at all familiar, it’s because it’s not too far off from our present-day truth. Since Urinetown debuted on Broadway in 2001, reality has rapidly caught up with the satire. After all, turn-of-millennium audiences couldn’t have foreseen the corporations’-right-to-free-speech Citizens United Supreme Court decision of 2010. Or Flint’s water crisis four years later. Or that billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk would have amassed so much data and wealth that they’re now immune to consequences.

That makes the experience of watching this simultaneously diverting and scathing piece of musical theater feel cathartic in a different way than it might have 20+ years ago. Since it turned out to be so prescient, the writing has become a digestif of sorts to help process the many challenges we face in 2023.

Throughout the show, we get hilarious, self-aware dialogue between two of the show’s characters, Lockstock (a magnetic Kevin Harry), an enforcer for Cladwell’s authoritarian regime, and Little Sally (Oglethorpe freshman Tatum McBride), who offer critiques of the writing at points and also discuss where the characters are headed. At one point, Lockstock chuckles casually to the young girl, “Oh, Little Sally, dreams only come true in happy musicals.”

What’s thrilling about watching this production is how it keeps building on its momentum, sending forth a thrill of anticipation that you could feel rippling through the audience. There’s a moment when things truly kick into high gear — literally, with high kicks — and the overall mission of the show becomes clear. Two of Cladwell’s soldiers, lieutenants Lockstock and (ahem) Barrel, suddenly begin to sing and dance exuberantly to “Cop Song” in the showy style of “Money” from Cabaret. It’s one chance of many for choreographer Precious West to showcase profoundly inventive, versatile and brilliant choreography skills.

We also get a classic Hollywood musical ode to corporate greed with “Mr. Cladwell” and the uplifting, if purposefully vague, uprising anthem “Run, Freedom, Run!” And while the act of organizing against powerful entities is never mocked, they do have some fun with the whole urine of it all, with signs that say things like, “Wee the Peeple” and “Get Your Coins Off My Loins.”

The leads are superb, starting with Russell Scott as leader of the pee-volution Bobby Strong and Emma Jean Scott as the villain’s idealistic daughter Hope Cladwell, and enhanced by the masterful turns of McBride and Harry as our sometime-narrators, Lockstock and Little Sally. But there’s not one single member of this ensemble who isn’t killing it, even in scenes where they have little to no dialogue.

In that respect, a standout from the townspeople (listed in the song credits as “the Poor”) is Patty De La Garza, who inhabits with almost supernatural zest a character named Little Becky Two Shoes, an extremely pregnant woman (De La Garza’s prosthetic belly protrudes even more between Acts I & II) who keeps getting passed over for a turn in the bathroom. In Act II, she gets a chance to tear the roof off with the wicked number, “Snuff That Girl,” which gives us reverberations of “Cool” from West Side Story.

Blessedly, the show keeps to its cynical course for the whole runtime. Just when you thought it might be veering off into saccharine and sentimental territory, it sticks its awesomely bitter landing. Urinetown is an absolute misanthropic delight, from first trickle to final flush.

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Alexis Hauk is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association. She has written and edited for numerous newspapers, alt-weeklies, trade publications and national magazines including Time, The Atlantic, Mental Floss, Uproxx and Washingtonian. An Atlanta native, Alexis has also lived in Boston, Washington D.C., New York City and Los Angeles. By day, she works in health communications. By night, she enjoys covering the arts and being Batman.