The premise of the UC follies latest production, is mostly clear from its name. Urinetown is a comedic musical about a drought so severe it’s lasted twenty years. Originally written by Greg Kotis, the play was inspired by those pesky European toilets, which command a fee for use.

Urine Good Company (a Wal Mart type monolith,) controls the public toilets and holds peeing as a privilege. Those who ignore the public bathroom rules, are sent into exile in Urinetown. The musical follows Bobby Strong as he champions his town’s cause –the right to urinate freely. While hiding from the police, he rouses a crowd of rebels and has a brush with romance when he encounters Hope Caldwell, the daughter of Urine Good Company’s CEO.

The cast of Urinetown is superb. Andrew Knowlton as Bobby Strong is an especially amiable character; you just want him to win. Joey Unnold’s Senator Fipp is sort of sleazy but hilariously animated. The poor rebels are fun to watch because of their exaggerated characters and even better during numbers such as “What is Urinetown” (Act2).
Without reading too much into the play, there seems to be a point to all this toilet talk. Urinetown could be a commentary on our current struggle with sustainability and social responsibility. It also encourages individual citizens to play a role in government control. Moral issue or not, the numbers will probably still be in your head for a time after seeing the show.

If interested, the production team has been keeping a pretty entertaining blog on the UC Follies webpage: http://ucfollies.c-ut.ca/wordpress/

For tickets:

$20 / $12 students
UofT Tix
Remaining shows from – 11th-14th, 8PM
February 14th matinée, 2PM!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 5:39 am and is filed under Arts, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.