Urinetown: The Musical

Product Description

Winner of three Tony Awards, including Best Book, Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann’s Urinetown: The Musical is a tale of greed, corruption, love, and revolution in a time when water is worth its weight in gold.
After a twenty-year drought made water a scarce commodity, private toilets became outlawed. Now, all restroom necessaries are controlled by the Urine Good Company (UGC), a megacorporation that charges fees for using public toilets. Anyone unable to pay fees–or who dares to relieve themselves outside the commode–are arrested and banished to “Urinetown”.
When UGC employee Bobby Strong’s father falls victim to this tyranny, he spearheads a revolution, inspiring the people to rise up and reclaim their own restroom duties–unaware of the realities and consequences of his actions…
With a preface by David Auburn, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Proof And an introduction by the authors

Review

“Elevated silliness of the highest order that makes a gratifying case for the restorative return to knowing foolishness and the smartly absurd. The show winks at everything from Hamlet’s father’s ghost to
West Side Story, from the revolutionary pretensions of
Les Mis to the revivalist joy of
Guys & Dolls.” ―
Linda Winer, Newsday

About the Author

Greg Kotis is a veteran of the Neo-Futurists, creators of the long-running attempt to perform thirty plays in sixty minutes. Jobey and Katherine, his play about fish, toast, and a love stronger and grimmer than death, enjoyed runs in New York and Chicago. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.
Mark Hollmann attended the Making Tuners Workshop at New Tuners Threatre in Chicago and the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in New York. A member of the Dramatists Guild and ASCAP, he lives in Manhattan with his wife.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction
1
JUNE 2
On June 2, 2002, Urinetown won three Tony Awards (one for book, one for score, and a third for direction), an event that — as of this writing — still feels quite warm and wonderful and difficult to believe. Throughout the evening of the Tony broadcast, people would approach me and ask, “Did you ever think the show would get this far?” to which I would answer, “Well, no, I didn’t.” An obvious answer to an obvious question. Urinetown, as they knew, and as you may know, arrived on Broadway as a ludicrous, harebrained transfer from Off-Broadway, itself an even more ludicrous transfer from Off-Off-Broadway. The show, apparently, was this absurdist musical about a world where people had to pay to pee, appropriate, perhaps, for some fringe festival on the Lower East Side of New York City, but not for Broadway, and certainly not as a nominee for a bevy of Tony Awards. At each leg of Urinetown’s journey from Stanton Street (Off-Off- Broadway) to Forty-third Street (Broadway), the conventional wisdom seemed to mutter, “This must not happen.” And yet, at each leg, it did happen — the show survived, flourished even, and eventually snuck its way forward toward that Broadway night of nights. By the end of the evening’s festivities, these “Did you ever think?” exchanges became something of a ritual, the asker knowing the answer, the answerer welcoming the basically rhetorical question. They took on the verbal equivalent of pinching yourself to see if you’re awake — “Am I dreaming? Apparently not.” The question, to be sure, is still welcome, because the journey isn’t over yet. As of this writing, Urinetown is planning a national tour, as well as a flurry of international productions, including Seoul, Tokyo, London, and more. Urinetown has its very own original cast recording, produced by a large, monopolizing corporation like RCA/Victor, no less. And now the text of the play has been published by a not quite monopolizing, but at least respected, mid-sized publishing outfit like Faber & Faber, complete with an introduction engaging enough to keep the reader reading until this ve