Urinetown (c) Joan Marcus
Theater: Urinetown
Presented by Encores! at New York City Center
There was always a problem with the title. Cheers to the publicity team of the original 2001 Broadway production of Urinetown who made the musical by songwriter Mark Hollmann and book writer Greg Kotis with the unpleasant title into a Tony-winning hit (although it lost Best Musical to Thoroughly Modern Millie) that ran for three years. Almost twenty-five years later, the title has been normalized to almost being quaint (“Remember the fuss over Urinetown?”), but the question at its new presentation by Encores! is if the show has retained its irreverence and humor, especially with its prescient plot of corrupt government and the dangers of global warming. Playing like a Charles Dickens novel adapted by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, the show takes place in the near future in a town in which a shady corporation charges its citizens to pay to use its public restrooms in response to a worldwide drought, and if they try to circumvent this (like peeing outside), they will be shipped to a mythical hellhole known as Urinetown. The corporation is run by Caldwell B. Cladwell (Rainn Wilson), who is made rich by bribing politicians. In a poorer section of town, Bobby Strong (Jordan Fisher), a young rabble rouser who sees the suffering of his family and friends and decides to rebel against this unfair law. Their power struggle is related to us by narrators Officer Lockstock (Greg Hildreth) and a young street waif, Little Sally (Pearl Scarlett Gold), who will also factor into the plot.
Urinetown (c) Joan Marcus
What the Encores! production, cleanly directed by Teddy Bergman, makes clear is that the show has always been a hodgepodge of different shows (Les Miserables, Anyone Can Whistle, Oliver!) without really finding a personality of its own. And yet there are enough fun jokes, surprising plot twists and at least a couple of catchy songs to keep you too distracted to notice that the second act drags from stagnation, personified by Bobby’s love interest, Hope, who spends most of the second act just tied to a swivel chair and gagged, although the talented Stephanie Styles expertly performs her chair choreography. The main reason to see this production is for the acting by the talented cast, including many showstopping moments by the powerhouse Keala Settle as Bobby’s boss, the always reliable Myra Lucretia Taylor as Bobby’s mother and, in small roles with big laughs, the hysterical Jeff Hiller (from the TV show Somebody Somewhere) as Caldwell’s lackey and John Yi as an excitable rebel. But it’s Jordan Fisher, moving a few blocks from Hadestown to Urinetown, who steals the show by playing everything mostly straight and with refreshing conviction. Urinetown is the perfect show for Encores! (be sure to check out the on-brand graffiti in the restrooms) and its mandate to revive shows that people may only know from its title. Urinetown. What were they thinking?
Still (c) Maria Baranova
Theater: Still
At the Sheen Center
I hate to spoil things right off the bat, but there’s more than what meets the eye in Lia Romeo’s Still, a two-hander play in which two ex-lovers meet up after breaking up decades earlier. What that “thing” is, of course, I won’t reveal, but as I was watching the first half of the play, it felt relatively old-fashioned, reminding me of Broadway chestnuts, like Same Time, Next Year and The Fourposter, only now with talk of Tinder, Covid and pronoun confusion. Helen (Melissa Gilbert) is a successful novelist living in Baltimore. Mark (Mark Moses) is a Denver lawyer and divorcee, in town for business, who, after (or because) of a mild heart attack event, suggests to Helen they meet for drinks. At the hotel lobby bar, the two sexagenarians compare life milestones (he has two adult daughters) and war injuries (Helen, who has never married, is dealing with health problems of her own), all the while, the wine is flowing and the subtle flirting gets a little more pronounced. Is the old spark still there? And how the evening ends is where I will stop talking about the plot, which other critics gleefully discussed when the play premiered Off-Broadway last year with Jayne Atkinson and Tim Daly in the leads. I didn’t see that production, but it appears director Adrienne Campbell-Holt has smoothly and successfully ushered the new cast into the play.
Still (c) Maria Baranova
Moses (Mad Men) gives Mark a nervous energy that occasionally appears underneath his smooth, suave façade. Gilbert (who is known for both her roles on Little House on the Prairie and as the former president of SAG) is more overtly vulnerable as Helen at first but doesn’t back down when reminiscences turn to accusations. At 75 minutes, the twist does feel like it either comes too late or the play ends too early to fully develop the implications of these characters’ choices. Still is one of Romeo’s first produced plays in New York and show she has a good ear for dialogue, well-drawn characters, and ultimately a balanced view over a conflict on issues most audience members probably had to deal with in their own lives. Still was originally produced by the Brooklyn-based Colt Coeur theater, which nurtured another play, Eureka Day, that is currently on Broadway. Certainly, an up-and-coming company to keep an eye on in the future.
English (c) Joan Marcus
☆ Broadway: English
Presented by Roundabout and Atlantic Theatre at the Todd Haimes Theater
English, Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a six-week adult English-as-a-foreign-language class in Iran, is one of the best plays written in the last five years. This wasn’t as clear to me when I saw the premiere at the Atlantic Theatre a few years back. The premise was deceptively straightforward, with the students speaking in broken English, as their teacher, Marjan (Marjan Neshat), insists they refrain from speaking Farsi during each four-hour class, but speak in fluent English when they break that rule and use their native tongue. The simpleness of the plot makes it inviting and relatable to a Broadway audience, most of whom would have at least tried to learn a foreign language in school. The playwright slyly drops hints during the lessons as to why each of the students are taking the class. There’s Roya (Pooya Mohseni), who wants to move to Canada to get to know her English-speaking granddaughter; there’s Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh) a recent high school graduate who wants to earn her TOEFL certificate to put on her resume for whatever comes next for her; there’s Elham (Tala Ashe), a scientist who needs to pass the TOEFL in order to get a dream job in Australia; and then there’s Omid (Hadi Tabbal), the only man in the class, who just wants to brush up on his English, which he seems to be pretty proficient in.
English (c) Maria Baranova
The dynamic of these students to each other and to Marjan, who had lived in the UK for nine years before returning to Iran to teach, is so nuanced and inviting in Toossi’s capable hands, that it almost feels unnecessary when she adds actual dramatic elements of the play (whenever a character shares something, but ask another character not to tell anyone else, get ready for conflict). Of course, I’m being facetious, because those moments are well-handled and engrossing, but I was also happy just hearing Goli try to explain her love of Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” for show-and-tell or Marjan showing a Julia Roberts film during her office hours. What Toossi wisely avoids is politics (many English-speaking countries are brought up, including the U.S.) and focuses mostly on what is lost in translation, literally and metaphorically, for these characters. Director Knud Adams’ production runs smoothly on Marsha Ginsberg’s masterful, rotating set, which felt slightly overwhelming Off-Broadway, but fits neatly On. The actors are all wonderful and work so well together, and like the spongy ball they throw to one another in a game of language tag, they keep the play afloat with ease.
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