Cast and crew of alumni and current students perform hilarious, provoking musical
Curtain Call Productions performed Urinetown from Friday, Oct. 24 to Sunday, Oct. 26., at the University of Guelph’s War Memorial Hall. The play, written by Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann, is a satirical look at class struggle, resource management, and social resilience, centered in a town where people have to pay to urinate in an attempt to save water during a worldwide drought.
When Bobby Strong’s (Devin dos Santos) father is taken to “Urinetown” for refusing to pay to use Public Amenity #9, his life is in shambles. The strapping, young idealist, with the help of the swaths of the poor in the city, decides to take action against the corrupt Caldwell B. Cladwell (Thomas M. Gofton), owner of Urine Good Company, the city’s water monopoly (UGC for short). Alongside Cladwell’s bureaucratic cronies are the sleazy Senator Fipp (Gary Abbott), and the melodramatic and ferocious amenity caretaker Mrs. Pennywise (Laura Nielsen). By kidnapping Cladwell’s daughter, Hope (Lindsay Cox), in order to convince Cladwell to let them pee for free, Bobby and his comrades aim to instill a fair and balanced order in the city.
Photo by Mohammad Melebari.
I am not going to give much more away at this point, because Urinetown really needs to be seen. But a quote by population theorist Thomas Malthus is printed in the program and permeates the play’s subtext: “The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” Make of that what you will – the satire is biting and sometimes hysterical, but indeed fatalistic. Don’t let that stop you from enjoying the fabulous dancing and songs, though.
The musical is self-aware to very funny degrees. With the narrative action reiterated to the audience by Officer Lockstock (Michael Kein), the play often takes on a “Brechtian” form. Bertolt Brecht, a German playwright, maintained that theatre should instigate a self-reflexively critical view of stage action; in other words, both the audience and the production must realize that the text being performed is just that, a performance.
CCP produced the play in 2007, and producers Lindsay Cox, Thomas Gofton, and Flo Labrie decided to perform it again, with both alumni and current students, for the University’s 50th anniversary. Devin dos Santos spoke with me about the performance history, saying, “Tommy [Gofton] and Lindsay [Cox], they did the show in 2007 with CCP. They decided they wanted to do a revamp of it, with as much of the original cast as possible. […] they had to bring on some new people, which includes me, and a lot of the people on stage.”
He added that it was a challenging role for him.
“Going into it, I was listening to the songs and I was like, ‘This is totally out of my range. I could never do this.’ But we started doing the rehearsals, and we got one-on-one time with our vocal director, Franny [McCabe-Bennett], who is amazing. Franny is so great. She’s made me do things with my voice that I never thought possible.”
Director Katie Shewen spoke of the production’s tight time management, “We pulled this together in six weeks, so it’s a really tight pull for a show this size. We had a three-day tech week, so if anyone knows the gear, they know that’s kinda crazy. Our first really full run was opening night, and it went really well.”
Producer Labrie discussed bringing the cast and crew from 2007 together. “Tom [Gofton] approached me, who is alumni, while I was the exec of Curtain Call last year. And he was the one that really introduced the idea of doing an alumni show for the university’s 50th anniversary, so I jumped on the bandwagon. I’m a current student, so I’m the one that brought the other half into the game […] It was beautiful to see the community come together. No matter what age you are, what background you are, we’ve all come together to produce a show that was really top quality. […] And that’s what we went to advertise with the show, that ‘This is the Curtain Call community.’ We’ve been on campus since 1957, we’re older than the university!”
The production was a roaring success – balancing incredible choreography with pitch-perfect line deliveries, the cast and crew pulled off an impressive show in such little time.