Pop Culture and Urinetown
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Friday, 16 March 07 - 01:05 PM (GMT) in Drafts - Program & Lobby Essays |
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Playing the Reference Game: Popular Culture and Urinetown
Urinetown, with its playful juggling of social commentary and outre, reveals an intricate system of reference and pastiche. Beyond appropriating elements from a multitude of Broadway shows and musical genres, Urinetown knowingly acknowledges its popular culture influences. In the preface to the published edition of Urinetown (Faber and Faber, 2003), David Auburn writes that the roots of the musical can be located in the storefront theatre company Cardiff Giant, a Chicago troupe that wrote and performed their own original pieces along with engaging in improvisational work. Both Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann, as Auburn states, “were two of the driving forces behind Cardiff Giant” (vi). The theatre company “created a theatrical landscape with features not to be found elsewhere” (v), with plots often set “in a kind of mid-twentieth-century Everytown” (v) with “evil or demented geniuses . . . wise waifs . . . angry mobs, corrupt politicians and ingénues who turned out to be as obsessive and bent as the villains they were opposing” (v-vi). Cardiff Giant also drew heavily from “old movies, cartoons, dimly remembered TV ads and grade-school educational films, and texts from the required U[niversity] of C[hicago] humanities and sociology classes” (v). From Hollywood cinema to early twentieth-century comics, Urinetown creates a pastiche of references that celebrate the bizarre and thrilling world of popular culture.
As for plot, Urinetown tips its fedora to Roman Polanski’s neo-noir Chinatown (1974), in which hard-boiled Jack Nicholson finds himself in a scenario concerning a corrupt capitalist, his daughter and the wealth that can be procured through the exploitation of the shrinking water supply. The gang of misfits and ne’er do wells from the working class riffs on the ubiquitous Dead End Kids/Bowery Boy films of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. With Wizard of Oz-inspired dialogue centered upon Hope’s stuffed head and Bobby confession that “there’s a vacuum where [my heart] used to be,” both the Scarecrow and Tin-Man from the 1939 film emerge as insightful character references.
Since both Kotis and Hollomann began professional theatre in the 1980s, it is not surprising that elements from popular American cinema of that decade are also present throughout Urinetown. The execution of a person via being thrown from a building is “borrowed” from the climax of the Chicago-centric and David Mamet scripted The Untouchables (1987). Hope’s conversion from meek daughter to a radical revolutionary in opposition to her capitalist father is a nod to the saga of Patricia Hearst, re- popularized in the 1980s by Paul Schrader’s bio-pic Patty Hearst (1988). Perhaps the most humorous reference in the play emerges from Bobby’s comment that “love has about as much chance as a baby bunny drowning in a vat of boiling water” which is an undeniable reference to the horrific, yet campy, “boiled-bunny” scene from the Michael Douglas/Glenn Close “potboiler” Fatal Attraction (1987).
The absurd notion of a society that must “pay to pee” also references the dark, satirical genre of the dystopian film. From Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), in which individuals literally find themselves trapped in the machinations of the industrial age to Soylent Green (1973), where the citizens realize that they themselves are serving as the food for the starving masses.
With broad personas, humorous actions, indescribable dialects and character names such as Officer Lockstock, Hot Blades Harry and Little Becky Two-Shoes, Urinetown also references popular American comic strips from the 1890s to the 1930s. Often cited as the first successful newspaper comic series, The Yellow Kid premiered in 1895 in New York World. It centered upon the violence, humor and escapades of youth in the slums of New York City. Described as satire “as about as subtle as a brick” (Goulart, 397), cartoonist Richard F. Outcault utilized garish costumes and working-class dialect (“Gee, dis beats de carpet, wich is hard to beat”) with crude humor. Urinetown also incorporates elements from the celebrated Krazy Kat series by George Herriman which creatively employed pop culture references interlaced with an amalgam of terms ranging from “slang, Yiddish, Victorian rhetoric, Elizabeth stage dialogue” to mixtures of speech lifted from “Dickens, the Bronx, Shakespeare, [and] the Deep South” (Goulart, 222). With Cladwell, we have a corrupt Daddy Warbucks-figure, essentially a twisted-version of the upstanding titan of industry from the unabashedly capitalist Little Orphan Annie. Other comics that can be connected to Urinetown include the “Gotham-like” city of its setting (Batman), the concept of an evil genius (Sivana from Captain Marvel) along various other elements drawn from Happy Hooligan, Buster Brown, Moon Mullins, as well as the grotesque gallery of bizarre criminals (the Blank, Mrs. Pruneface, the Mole, etc.) from Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. In addition, Urinetown draws additional imagery and elements from Winsor Mccay’s surreal Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905) and Chris Ware’s various architectonic comics that appeared in the Chicago Reader during the 1980s.
Beyond comics, Urinetown acknowledges other literary influences. Its quasi Depression-era setting evokes John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, while its consistent references to “bunnies” allude to the doomed dreams of Lenny in Of Mice and Men. As the humorous names of characters undeniably can be traced back to Charles Dickens and fellow Victorians, Urinetown also seems to quote scenarios and unabashed “optimism” from Horatio Alger’s novels for young men that celebrated the “can do” spirit of capitalism and boot-strap economics. All in all, Urinetown provides a multi-weave (yet yellow-stained) fabric that allows for a unique form of audience engagement - one that challenges viewers to employ their pop culture knowledge to decode the references.
--Shannon Skelton
Works Cited
Goulart, Ron, Ed. The Encyclopedia of American Comics. New York: Facts on File, 1990.
Malthus and the Stink Years
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Friday, 16 March 07 - 12:56 PM (GMT) in Drafts - Program & Lobby Essays |
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HAIL MALTHUS
At the end of “Urinetown” Officer Lockstock leads the cast in a salute to Malthus. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was one of the first political economists to study poverty. In 1798 Malthus predicted that human overpopulation would exceed natural resources, particularly the food supply. Malthus argued that human overpopulation was kept in check by cataclysms such as natural disasters, war, epidemic disease and famine. For Malthus, God allowed devastating natural catastrophes to regulate the human population. As Officer Lockstock – the voice of Malthus in the musical - states, “Dreams are meant to be crushed. It’s nature’s way.”
Malthus argued against public assistance for indigent people affected by famine because the poor would not be able to sustain their families, thus weakening the population. Malthus characterized the poor as preternaturally lazy and prone to vice, and believed that exposure to middle class values (such as universal education and hard work) would motivate individuals out of penury. Malthusian theories were used to justify the denial of famine aid to India and influenced British relief policies during the Irish potato famine.
In “Urinetown” Malthus is more than a ironic punch line. The salute to Malthus returns the audience to real social issues, the ecological undercurrents in the bubbling froth of musical comedy. Although Malthus is faulted for his unsympathetic views on poverty and suffering, his work posed enduring questions about the sustainability of a growing global population. For Malthus, cyclical miseries would only be prevented with a substantive change in human nature. In “Urinetown” the heroic characters cannot accept that the future of Gotham depends on restraint of human rights and desires. Hope and Bobby’s idealistic notions of freedom cannot be survive in a world of enduring drought. As Officer Lockstock quips to Little Sally, “Don’t you think people want to be told that their way of life is unsustainable?”
- Julie Vogt
THE STINK YEARS
The Urine Good Company of “Urinetown” is a comic depiction of unregulated monopolies and free market privatization. The audience is prompted to laugh at Hope’s description of UGC as “the private company that controls these public bathrooms” because one rarely thinks about the water bill when the toilet is flushed, or consider it a privilege to use our own bathroom. It is easy to forget that we do in fact, pay to pee. A public service is provided to our private homes. The municipal infrastructure that keeps our cities clean arose from failures of early urbanization. Gothams such as London and Paris stank for most of the nineteenth century. These cities were epicenters for cholera, a deadly disease transmitted by contaminated water.
In the recent bestselling book “Ghost Map,” Stephen Johnson chronicles an outbreak of cholera in London in the summer of 1854. (Over ten thousand people could die in one week in a cholera epidemic. The 1854 Chicago outbreak claimed 5% of the population). Johnson graphically describes nineteenth century London with rising overpopulation and a poor sewage system. Although toilets had come into vogue, the water closets flushed to a basement or backyard cesspool. In Victorian London, it was very expensive to hire men to collect the “night soil,” so many landlords chose to ignore the waste. Johnson cites a civil engineer who found basements three-feet deep in night soil. When sewage contaminated urban water systems, fatal cholera spread quickly through the population. The stink years were a dangerous time to live.
The regulation of bodily functions in “Urinetown” may seem oppressive and absurd (Or, as Little Sally suggests, terrible subject matter for a musical). But the interconnections between personal health and public policy are a matter of life and death.
- Julie Vogt
Socially Conscious Musical
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Friday, 16 March 07 - 12:54 PM (GMT) in Drafts - Program & Lobby Essays |
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Urinetown ushers in a new/old fashion: the socially conscious musical
“Well, hello there. And welcome to Urinetown! Not the place, of course. The musical.” With Officer Lockstock’s opening words, Urinetown: The Musical makes its splash in the pond of musical theatre. It will be self-referential, humorous, satirical, deliberately dim-witted, socially conscious and silly. It will make you laugh, and it just might make you think.
Urinetown’s songs are cliché, sounding lifted directly from classic American musicals like West Side Story, Guys and Dolls and The Fantasticks. To summarily dismiss Urinetown as an updated version of Threepenny Opera with some Producers thrown in would be a mistake, however. Beneath the deceptive simplicity of the plot and familiarity of the music, Urinetown advanced the tide of the socially aware musical. Theatre historian John Bush Jones wrote, “Urinetown is heralding a return to those kinds of shows from past decades in which ‘serious musical’ and ‘entertaining musical’ were not contradictions in terms” (358). While Urinetown is a send-up of the techniques of musicals with a social conscience such as Ragtime, Rent and William Finn’s Falsettos trilogy, its own overarching message remains deadly serious: the writers’ fear that “We are killing ourselves, and there’s nothing we can do about it” (CITE).
Jones called Urinetown a “socially relevant, issue-driven, and often provocative – as well as entertaining…outrageous musical satire” (356). Book writer and lyricist Greg Kotis cites among his influences Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, a pair who tried to create socially effective theatre in post-WWII Germany by constantly reminding the audience of the medium. Using satire and irony to raise serious questions about individual freedoms versus corporate monopolies and totalitarian control, Urinetown asks a chilling question while never losing its playfulness, combining a frightening authenticity with disarming charm.
That Kotis was also influenced by cultural parodies in The Simpsons alongside his devotion to Leonard Bernstein is no surprise. The popular cartoon show is enjoyable whether one “gets” the references or not; similarly, “like good television writing, Urinetown [can] be enjoyed, for better or for worse, on virtually any level…ultimately, you [don’t] have to think at all to enjoy Urinetown. Still, it helped if you could” (Singer 225). Urinetown never stops making fun of itself and other members of its genre, leaving virtually no aspect of musical Broadway un-spoofed, from the intellectualization of Stephen Sondheim to the dance steps of Bob Fosse. In its ironic self-reflexivity, “Urinetown tapped the same ironic currents of popular culture as The Producers but amplified them…Where The Producers flirted with vulgarity, Urinetown sang about urinating” (Singer 227-8).
Kotis opines in one interview that “there’s a ridiculousness about people breaking into song every few minutes that is both wonderful and terrible at the same time” (Singer 228). Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez, creators of Avenue Q, addressed the embarrassment of young audiences by making those who are “breaking into song” puppets, a throwback to Sesame Street. Also, in the same season, 2001-02, other shows on Broadway shared Urinetown’s ironic streak: Reefer Madness, a spoof on a 1936 school education film about marijuana, The Rocky Horror Show, a musical of the film satire of the same name, and Bat Boy, a musical ripped from the tabloid headlines about a half-boy, half-bat who tries to assimilate with violent results. Bat Boy, like Urinetown, is self-referential and “poked fun at musical theater history and, of course, at the musical itself”(Singer 231).
Urinetown’s unique trip to Broadway through the New York Fringe has not diminshed its powerful social statement, all the more potent for its use of humor and irony. John Weidman, multiple Tony-winning author of Assassins, Big, and Contact, said, “The danger is that what you wind up with is a slightly homogenized safe product…The route that Urinetown followed to get to Broadway is probably what more and more interesting musicals are going to follow, because there were not expectations from those guys. They wrote what they wanted, and then it got moved along” (274). As its success has shown, a small-scale, low-budget musical like Urinetown – a musical with a conscience, heart and a streak of bathroom humor – can still make a splash with audiences.
Bryer, Jackson R. and Richard A. Davison, eds. The Art of the American Musical: Conversations with the Creators. Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 2005.
Jones, John Bush. Our Musicals, Ourselves: A social history of the American musical theater. Brandeis University Press: Lebanon, NH, 2003.
Singer, Barry. Ever After: The Last Years of Musical Theater and Beyond. Applause: New York, 2004.
-- Linsday Christians
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