Urinetown at Lyric Stage

Urinetown: The Musical

Lyric Stage Boston

September 20 – October 20, 2024

Little Sally (Paige O’Connor) tries to escape from Office Lockstock (Anthony Pires, Jr.) in Urinetown: The Musical.
Photo by Nile Hawver

What do you call a musical whose heroine spends the second act kidnapped, gagged, and bound to an office chair in an underground sewer? What do you call a musical whose hero dies an ignoble yet hilarious death? What do you call a musical whose intrepid chorus rebels against Power only to recreate the stink years? Obviously…you call it Urinetown: The Musical.

Lyric Stage’s production of this “exuberant musical comedy with a truly dreadful title,” is pitch perfect at every turn. The cast of fourteen, under Artistic Director Courtney O’Connor’s snappy direction, pour out of every niche and aisle of Lyric’s cozy theater, and fill the main stage with catchy songs, clever choreography, and punch lines that land solid in your gut. The set of shattered plumbing fixtures is effectively atrocious. Ditto the outlandish, threadbare costumes.

The plot of Urinetown is simple as it is broad. A twenty-year drought has delivered a shortage so severe that all water is rationed, dribbled out to the people by the private company UGC (Urine Good Company). People have to pay to pee! From that premise, no potty joke remains unzipped.

Urinetown premiered on Broadway in 2001, garnered ten Tony nominations, and won three. Like all great musicals, major themes underpin the lightheartedness. More than twenty years later, the show’s prescient exposure of our climate crisis, it’s satire on capitalism, populism, corruption, and bureaucracy percolates beneath the surface silliness. Nevertheless, the human capacity to rise in stirring song transcends evil, without ever dampening the hysterical antics of townspeople writhing to relieve themselves.

Even as Urinetown parodies corporate greed, so too it parodies itself as a Broadway musical. Theater aficionados will find traces of Kurt Weill, Les Miz, and Bob Fosse embedded in the song and dance. But you’ll be laughing so hard you’ll likely miss them. Not to worry. The tunes are so hummable, they’ll accompany you beyond the theater, and into the real world where—say it isn’t so Little Sally—we are running short of water.