The idea for the Tony Award®-winning musical Urinetown came to writer Greg Kotis while traveling through Europe as a student on a tight budget. He tried to save money by eating in cheap restaurants and sleeping in train stations. When he discovered that many of the public restrooms in Europe were pay-per-use, he also avoided going to the bathroom as much as possible. That’s when the idea for a place like Urinetown began to form in his mind. “It would be a grand, ridiculous reflection of the world as we know it to be, complete with rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless, a government controlled by industry and an industry that exists apart from and above us all.” he wrote in the introduction of the published version of the show.
In the preface to the published script, composer Mark Hollman describes his rule for the show: “a joke is funnier if you don’t smile while you’re telling it.” The musical’s satire begins with an absurd premise—all of the toilets in the city are controlled by one greedy corporation. As a satirical comedy, the show makes us laugh while also exploring very real social issues of corporate greed, the growing divide between the rich and the poor, and environmental conservation. Through humor and parody, Urinetown tackles some of the most pressing issues in contemporary society.
Social satire has a long tradition of startling audiences and shaking them loose from their traditional ways of thinking. From Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to Saturday Night Live, satire has always broken the boundaries of public taste in order to make a point. Urinetown draws on that tradition. It has something to say about the world we live in. Not only that, it’s entertaining and educational.
Satire was found in revues, including the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, in which Bob Hope appeared in a sketch satirizing government spending. Hope also starred that year in the political farce Red, Hot & Blue!, which satirized Supreme Court rulings against the New Deal.
Musicals have continued to toss barbs in The Threepenny Opera (1932), How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961), Hair (1968), Company (1970), Chicago (1975), Assassins (1990), Bat Boy (1997) and many others. The most recent is the smash hit Hamilton (2015), which revisits history by incorporating hip-hop, rap, pop music and traditional show tunes.
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