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Urinetown Is Still Potable
Whoa, there! Plenty of prescience reveals itself in Encores!’s revival of the 2001 musical.
Urinetown, a defiantly scatological show that premiered on Broadway in 2001, is about a community in the throes of a drought where, thanks to the dominion of the Urine Good Company over the water supply, citizens must pay for the privilege of peeing. The show’s both a one-off lightning strike of an experiment intersecting with commercial success, and the sort of thing that precedes similar lovingly crafted but “up-yours” works like Avenue Q — I’m morbidly fascinated how the nihilism of that might play in an Encores! The night I saw Urinetown, Tiffany Mann stepped up to replace Keala Settle as Pennywise, digging into the petty potty tyrant with fervor, with a voice that launches out of her like an arc of electricity off a Tesla coil.
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