The Tony Award-winning musical “Urinetown” takes the crises of water shortages and the politics of the haves and have-nots and turns them on their heads: What if people were forced to pay for every use of a toilet?
The Mohawk Trail Regional High School performs “Urinetown” this weekend: Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Mohawk auditorium.
This satirical musical comedy was on Broadway from 2001 to 2004, and has been performed on many stages throughout the United States, in Great Britain and in Brazil.
The premise is this: To regulate water consumption after a 20-year drought, the use of private toilets is outlawed, and people must use public pay toilets owned and operated by Urine Good Company.
That corporation provides the only pay toilets in a place where unsanitary “public urination” has been criminalized, with the punishment an exile to an unkown place called “Urinetown.” Some already can’t afford the pay toilet, and a fee hike is about to take place.
The opening scene takes place at “Public Amenity #9,” the cheapest, shabbiest public latrine, where the poor line up for hours, some sleeping on the floor, and some panhandling for spare change:
Little Sally: “Penny for a pee, sir?”
Pipp: “Out of my way, child! I’ve peeing of my own to tend to.”
The play was inspired by a pay-toilet that author Greg Kotis found while traveling through Europe as a student on a limited budget.
In 2002, the Broadway show won Tony Awards for “best book of a musical” and “best original score.”
The comical aspects allow some very serious issues to be addressed in a comical way, says director Will MacAdams of Amherst. A playwright, director, and performer who creates original plays inspired by local stories, MacAdams was recently a visiting assistant theater professor at Hampshire College.
His theater experience includes working with artists in Clear Creek, Ky. to create a community-based play about ancestry, land and hydrofracking. He also directed a graduate theater program in Johannesburg, South Africa and studied Javanese shadow puppetry in Central Java, Indonesia.
Mohawk teachers had already selected ‘Urinetown’ before MacAdams was hired to direct it.
“A team of teachers met regularly and read through a lot of plays,” he explained. He said Urinetown was selected “to respond to student interest more relevant to our time and places.”
About 26 students from grades 8 to 12 are performing in this show.
“What I’m saying to people is that it’s a very entertaining, funny and also deeply relevant piece,” he said. “There’s a lot of room for students to grow artistically. What’s more amazing about the writing is that it manages to be entertaining while asking big questions.”
“It was big at the moment it came out, and it’s set in a lot of high schools,” said Will.
Dancer and senior student Kylee Cole of Shelburne has choreographed at least nine dance numbers in the show. Cole, an honor student, has been dancing since age 3 and is versed in tap, jazz, ballet and hip-hop.
Mohawk senior Lexxy Boron-Smith of Shelburne plays Hope Cladwell, the daughter of wealthy toilet magnate Caldwell Cladwell, whose rose-colored view of the world is changed when she falls in love with a rebellious youth leader who stages an uprising against the hierarchy.
“I’m glad we’ve chosen to do a less whimsical version,” Boron-Smith says of the musical. “Either it’s done as a very staunch comedy, and my character is played off as a dumb blonde – naive, not very intelligent, dreamy, stuck in the clouds. Or, the other way it’s played is it’s a real serious show about classism, sexism, police violence, poverty,” she said.
“There’s a lot the show touches on. The way it’s played here is to bring these things to the forefront and not dismiss them as a kind of joke.”
“My character believes in love and passion but also sees the wrongs of society. She sees these evils and comes out of the trap (of believing) that ‘everything’s good,’” Boron-Smith said. “I was not aware of the deep stuff I was going to get into.”
She said other Mohawk shows that she’s been in, “The Wizard of Oz” and “Seussical the Musical” were “fun shows but don’t really get into the things that this show deals with.”
“I’m glad Will has taken that turn,” she said. “There are so many different things people confront. I hope the people who come to see it realize that it’s not just a joke; it is serious, it is real and there’s stuff that society needs to look at.”
Tickets are $10 for adults, $5 for students and seniors. Children under 2 years old get free admission, although this show is not recommended for younger children. Reservations for tickets are available online at:
mohawkmusicalreservations@gmail.com or by calling the school at 413-625-9811, ext. 1364.
“Urinetown” is presented through special arrangement with Music Theatre International (MTI).