Photo Credit: Mark Frohna
There are many Easter eggs in Skylight Music Theatre’s production of Urinetown—some written into the book and score, and some added by this production’s creators—but it’s the iconoclastic political message that hits hardest. In a world of extreme partisanship in which politicians are regularly bought and sold and the system often seems more horse trade than actual representation, it’s refreshing to be told directly, “This doesn’t work.” Neither unfettered greed and wealth consolidation nor starry-eyed idealism and unregulated use of resources will keep a country afloat. The middle ground truly is the only feasible solution.
Design-wise, Skylight aptly set the piece 20 years in the future. The industrial park look of Brandon Kirkham’s set is all too familiar—like parts of the Milwaukee River landscape only a few years down the line. Costumes by Kärin Simonson Kopischke highlight the show’s cartoon of extreme class differentiation. Holly Blomquist’s lighting is similarly melodramatic: dazzling as the most heightened moments of Les Misérables, but illuminating such spectacles as revolutionaries brandishing toilet plungers. The choreography (Ryan Cappleman) and music (David Bonofiglio and a small band) are polished as well, and these elements are most important to the production’s musical theater-insider angle. Here we get the show’s many references to other musicals delivered with an impressive blend of emotional broadness and artistic precision. Per Bertolt Brecht’s model, the point isn’t to make us feel, but to think. Sure, some of what we’re thinking runs something like, “Wait, was that the bottle dance from Fiddler?”, but the song and dance are also there to highlight the over-the-top nature of modern politics. What better way to suggest the ludicrous corruption of a senate buyoff than with a scene mirroring The Cradle Will Rock?
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The performers under director Ray Jivoff keep this connection at the front of our brains, too. Rich Pendzich’s Officer Lockstock and Kaylee Annable’s Little Sally serve as meta-narrators from opposite ends of the privilege scale, united in frank and friendly banter about how the story must play out given both the conventions of musical theater and the show’s lofty goal to speak directly to a disenchanted modern audience. Steven M. Koehler as a blustering, unavoidably Trump-like villain and Rachael Zientek as his daughter, Hope, whose name is an unavoidable Obama reference, are exaggerated embodiments of extreme conservatism and liberalism. An impressive ensemble of often double-cast performers fly through transitions spanning a vast array of styles and periods. They present a bevy of caricatures united only by the fact that they’re all designed to make us question a broken status quo.
Through June 10 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Cabot Theatre, 158 N. Broadway. For tickets, call 414-291-7800 or visit skylight musictheatre.org.
