John Rando flushes out a big success with “˜Urinetown’
By Daily Bruin Staff
May 12, 2004 9:00 p.m.
What makes “Urinetown,” and especially the touring
production that opened a two-week run at the Wilshire Theatre on
Tuesday night, work so well as a musical comedy is not that it
manages to make good use of its preposterous main conceit in spite
of itself.
The basic premise of the show is about a city suffering from a
terrible water shortage, which has been taken over by a greedy
toilet monopoly that forces every citizen to pay a fee to use the
only legal bathrooms available. This is, of course, ludicrous. But
the success of “Urinetown” (it was nominated for 10
Tony Awards in 2002 and walked away with three of them) is actually
rooted much more in how it winks and nods its way through the
story, always hyperconscious of the fact that nothing in this world
really makes a modicum of sense.
This sort of humor is a difficult balancing act to pull off
without seeming too self-consciously clever, but
“Urinetown” does it incredibly well and with laugh-out-
loud results.
The touring cast for this show is remarkably strong, thanks no
doubt to the presence of director (and UCLA alumnus) John Rando,
who also helmed the original Broadway production.
Ron Holgate is delightful as the moneygrubbing corporate
slimeball behind the toilet empire, Caldwell B. Cladwell. Though he
suffers somewhat from having his first big number, “Mr.
Cladwell,” be the weakest one in the show’s entire
songbook, Holgate more than makes up for it by finding every single
joke in his performance of the fantastic “Don’t Be the
Bunny.” The particular way that he makes bunny ears out of
his fingers is priceless.
Cladwell’s nemesis, the unlikely assistant restroom
attendant-turned-revolutionary Bobby Strong, is portrayed as a
confused, swaggering, overly posed John Travolta impersonation by
Charlie Pollock, which under any other circumstances would probably
be an insult, but somehow in “Urinetown” it is perfect.
The hero of this story can’t be an earnestly wide-eyed
do-gooder. He has to be a cartoon version of that hero.
Christiane Noll as Cladwell’s daughter and the object of
Bobby’s affection, Hope, displays her verifiable singing
prowess just as well as her knack for comedy, seamlessly
transitioning between alarmingly beautiful solos and squeaky,
purposely annoying dialogue.
Other standouts from the cast include the outrageous Beth McVey
as Ms. Pennywise and Meghan Strange as the all-too-curious Little
Sally, who, along with “Urinetown’s” most unique
creation: the narrator Officer Lockstock (Tom Hewitt), provides the
majority of inside jokes that make the musical so funny.
Despite some big problems with the sound engineering that seem
to plague most shows at the Wilshire Theatre,
“Urinetown” is a smash success.
-Sommer Mathis
