'Urine' for something

'Urine' for something
Delta musical uses laughs to make serious points

BRIAN MCCOY
Record Entertainment Editor
Published Thursday, May 4, 2006

San Joaquin Delta College is staging the Tony Award- winning musical "Urinetown.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Playwrights learned long ago that the best way to address a serious issue is through humor.

Audiences don't want a lecture, no matter how grave the subject. Entertain them as you deliver your message, however, and they're sure to embrace it.

At first glance, the show appears all silliness and satire. Set in a world where people must pay to use the bathroom, the musical features arch characters, star-crossed lovers right out of "Romeo and Juliet" and a score that goes out of its way to spoof such landmark musicals as "Sweeney Todd," "Chicago" and "Fiddler on the Roof." Even the title carries a pun.
Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann employed that concept in creating "Urinetown," the Tony Award-winning musical being presented this weekend and next at San Joaquin Delta College.

It's an "anti-musical," Delta director John White said. "It pokes fun at the American musical."

But beneath its comic exterior, "Urinetown" addresses compelling contemporary issues.

What human beings are doing to the environment is embodied in the 20-year drought that leads to the banning of private toilets. That all restrooms are in the hands of a single corporation (the Urine Good Co.) speaks to the hazards of the concentration of wealth and power in the world economy. That the politicians represent corporate interests over those of the public reflects the growing helplessness so many voters feel.

"It addresses these issues and yet keeps everybody laughing," White said.

The idea for the musical came when Kotis visited Paris in the mid-1990s. Finding himself pinching pennies in order to access the city's pay toilets, he imagined a show based on the economic politics of using the bathroom.

Kotis shared the idea with Hollmann, and together they produced a version of the show for the 1998 New York International Fringe Festival. Three years and several incarnations later, "Urinetown" reached Broadway. It went on to win three Tonys and spawn a national tour.

In the Delta production, Caleb Draper and Catherine Frye are cast as the star-crossed lovers. She is Hope Cladwell, daughter of Caldwell B. Cladwell, Urine Good's chief executive officer. He is Bobby Strong, a former employee who in time leads the rebellion against the company.

That "Urinetown" is neither a straight musical comedy nor drama presents challenges for the cast of 38.

The actors are required to strike just the right note in dialogue that moves between the serious and the satirical.

"Part of the humor of the show is how serious we all are," Draper said. "We have to go to the extreme with our emotions.

"But the show is so well constructed, it's all very obvious when we're supposed to be hamming it up and when we're supposed to be serious," he added. "It all kind of just fits."

For White, a larger task has been getting his cast to master the music. The "Urinetown" score is more intricate than many others, requiring technical expertise even as it embraces styles as divergent as Gilbert and Sullivan patter and "Les Miserables" rallying cries.

"They adopted a Brechtian approach," White said of Kotis and Hollmann. "And we spent probably more time than other shows on the singing. (The cast) really needed to work on multiple parts being sung at the same time."

Contact Record Entertainment Editor Brian McCoy at (209) 546-8293 or bmccoy@recordnet.com