- April 18, 2024
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Actor Beau Wade has some advice for people who attend the City Repertory Theatre’s production of “Urinetown.”
“Bring your pennies,” says Wade, who plays Officer Lockstock in the show. “Because all the poor people beg for money from the audience.”
If you know anything about the show, you know it’s urgent that you don’t let them down.
The satirical musical comedy takes plays in the not-so-distant future. A 20-year drought has led the government to ban private toilets, and all of the public bathrooms are pay-toilets, owned by the Urine Good Company.
The CRT at City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B207, will show its production of "Urinetown" on consecutive weekends, Oct. 22-24 and Oct. 29-31.
The show is the second in CRT’s 2021-22 season. But the three-time Tony Award winner was not the theatre’s No. 1 choice for this slot, Wade said.
“Our first option we were not able to get the rights to,” he said. “Plan B we also were not able to get the rights to, so “Urinetown” was something I suggested to kind of fill the big Tony Award-winning musical show that we do once a year.”
Wade is a “Urinetown” veteran. This is the third time he has performed in a production of the show.
“It premiered in 2001, so it’s been around a long time, and it’s produced everywhere,” said director and CRT co-founder John Sbordone. “We do a lot of alternative kinds of things and this one is so conventional. It’s really very conventional. And that makes it fun to do.”
Adapting the show, which originally had a cast of 30, to CRT’s intimate theatre, which seats about 50, was also fun to do, Sbordone said.
“We literally have to climb the walls to get our people in there along with the audience,” he said.
The seats are divided into groups. Some face the small stage, some don’t, but the actors go everywhere in the room, performing on and off the stage and the two thrusts – stages that protrude into the audience.
“We bend our cast and material and venue to the audience. It’s a coming together of all those elements."
JOHN SBORDONE, CRT artistic director
“We use the entire room,” Sbordone said. “The audience is part of the show.”
In fact, two seats next to the stage are designated as action seats. If you sit there you are asked to participate in the rebellion.
“Every show will have a different shape,” Sbordone said. “We bend our cast and material and venue to the audience. It’s a coming together of all those elements. You can’t transplant one of our shows someplace else, because it’s designed for here, shaped for the environment.”
As Officer Lockstock, Wade is one of the show’s many villains as well as the narrator.
Other villains include Penelope Pennywise, played by Phillipa Rose, who runs Amenity No. 9, which is the poorest amenity in Urinetown (the place not the musical).
“Our amenities of course are bathrooms,” Rose said. “She has been around since the start of the stink years when the drought started, and she’s become tough and one of the evil people in the show.”
Danno Waddell plays the corrupt Senator Fipp.
“I take money from big corporations and make what they want to happen, happen,” Waddell said. Just like the real world.”
Earl Levine plays Caldwell B. Cladwell, the head of the company.
“I have managed to get all the power,” Levine said. “When they decide they don’t want to pay the fees I keep hiking up, I go after them.”
Laniece Fagundes, who starred as Billie Holiday in CRT’s first production of the season “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” plays female lead Hope Cladwell in "Urinetown."
“It’s a fun show and I think we’re having a lot of fun with it,” Sbordone said. “And we have a great music director in Ben Beck and terrific singers.”
