Pop Culture and Urinetown
|
 |
in Drafts - Program & Lobby Essays Published: Friday, 16 March 07 - 01:05 PM (GMT) |
| ||
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.
Have your say on this article:
<-- Back
