Pop Smart - OnStage Atlanta whips out Urinetown and new season
This weekend I’ll be taking another trip down to Urinetown at OnStage Atlanta. The small theater company staged Mark Hollman and Greg Kotis’ wicked musical parody in March of 2006 (here’s my review of that production). New artistic company manager Barbara Cole Uterhardt directs the re-mount, which features her husband Geoffrey “Googie” Uterhardt as Officer Lockstock and brings back some players, such as Jenna Edmonds as little Sally and Robert Wayne as the plutocratic Mr. Cladwell.
A satire of capitalism, revolutionary movements and musicals like Les Miserables, Urinetown takes place in a city afflicted with a water shortage that requires its citizens to pay every time they go to the bathroom. (I hope the show doesn’t give the City of Atlanta any ideas.) Eventually the literally unwashed masses rise up against the system, including the oppressive police force, who come across like jackbooted boogeymen in the “Cop Song” (from a Penn State production):
I can’t wait to see what Googie Uterhardt does with this number.
OnStage Atlanta has also announced the titles (but not dates) of its 2008-2009 season: the Irish dramas The Weir and St. Nicholas by Conor McPherson; the comedy The Underpants, translated by Steve Martin; the man-and-his-dog comedy Sylvia by A.R. Gurney; the literate medical drama Wit by Atlanta’s Pulitzer-winning Margaret Edson; and the Roaring Twenties musical The Wild Party by Andrew Lippa.