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Urinetown: The Musical about the Privileges of Peeing
A conversation with composer Mark Hollmann

By Robert Wilder Blue

An art form is sustained by those works that play to the masses. Whether they are created by masters (Brahms) or also-rans (Cornelius) is of little consequence, so long as they attract a paying audience. But an art form evolves when a man or woman, for whatever reason, sees in his/her surroundings something different and is able to capture and illuminate that moment for all to witness (Wagner). In the modern American musical theater, the latter phenomenon is represented by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma (1943) and Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (1979).

The most recent example of originality in the musical theater is Urinetown, by Mark Hollman (music/lyrics) and Greg Kotis (book/lyrics). Urinetown is a satirical, political piece, based solidly in the tradition of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. It manages to be unique, provocative, entertaining, and, despite the unsavory subject matter and obvious drawbacks of its name, successful.

The idea for Urinetown came from a real-life experience. On holiday in Paris, Greg Kotis found himself pinching pennies by avoiding using les toilettes, something that cost if one happened to be in public. In a flash of mad inspiration, Mr. Kotis imagined a musical theater piece about the politics of peeing. Back in the U.S., he revealed the idea to his friend and collaborator, Mr. Hollmann, who went home and came up with the song, “It’s a Privilege to Pee.” And that was the birth of Urinetown.

First draft in hand, Urinetown’s creators alternated between moments when they were convinced no one would want to see their show and episodes of great chutzpah when they tried to convince one producer after another to pay attention to it. Their first break came with a self-produced performance at the 1998 New York International Fringe Festival. That one exposure was all the show needed. Several incarnations later, Urinetown opened on Broadway on September 20, 2001, where it is still playing. Now, with the launch of the national company, the show is a bonafide institution.

On the eve of its opening at the American Conservatory Theater [ACT] in San Francisco, usOperaweb spoke with Mr. Hollmann about his life B.U. (Before Urinetown). “I was born in Belleville, Illinois,” he confessed, “which is in southern Illinois near St. Louis, Missouri. I went to public grade school in Fairview Heights and high school in Belleville. Both my parents were school teachers. My father also plays the guitar and sings. He writes parodies of songs for various environmental and other political issues he is involved with in Illinois. He is into legalizing hemp-not marijuana, but the plant hemp. He gets on the local TV stations as a activist. I must have inherited whatever sense of humor he has that gets him to do that.

John Cullum as Caldwell B. Cladwell in the Broadway production of Urinetown. Photo © Joan Marcus.

“I think music was the thing I did the most when I was growing up. I have two younger sisters and when we got a piano in the house, everyone started playing it, although I am the only one who remained with it. I was in the school and church choirs and in every band I could get into in public schools. I played the trombone in the marching band, concert band and stage band, which was like a small swing band.

“I went to the University of Chicago with the idea that I would get a law degree and go into politics. But I ended up switching to music as a major midway through my years there. The great thing about the University of Chicago, which is a difficult school, is that it forced me to figure out what I wanted to do in my life because I couldn’t just breeze through any course of study there. I realized that music was the constant in my life, and that's when I got interested in composing and writing musicals.

“I had been taking harmony and composition as electives when I was a political science and then an English major. By the time I switched to music, I had taken so many music electives that I was on track to graduate on time in four years. It wasn’t until later, though, that I found a composition teacher who ended up teaching me what I needed to know to write melodies. That was in 1990, when I met William Russo, chairman of the music department at Columbia College in Chicago and a former composer, arranger and trombonist for Stan Kenton and his orchestra. Bill, who passed away earlier this year, had a method of teaching composition that is unique, and for whatever reason, it clicked for me. He took an interest in me and my career. His method helped me understand what a melody was and how to construct a convincing one. I ended up teaching composition for him in the department for a couple of years in my late twenties.”

Can writing a good melody be taught and learned or is it an innate talent?

“I think it can be taught. But having lots of good music around you is definitely important too. The music that plays in your head as you’re walking around in your daily life is of great influence. I think that singing in church was a great influence on me, too. Hymns are filled with good melodies. I was a church organist for six years and that was interesting because I felt I was getting back to something that was very basic in my musical education.”

What were your first musical influences?

“In high school, the band director somehow thought I would be interested in opera and he lent me some opera albums and a Kurt Weill album. The Weill album opened my eyes to Three Penny Opera and that caught my imagination immediately. The opera wasn’t as interesting to me, but I did end up listening to a lot of Verdi because the melody is so dramatic with him. I think that had a big influence on me, although I didn’t go on to become an opera lover. I see an opera about once a year, so I don’t consider that being a real aficionado. But Weill made me start looking into musical theater and how it could be political.

“I don’t listen to a lot of pop music. I feel that it’s not the greatest influence on people who are trying to learn the craft or art of composing. Because I was kind of a nerdy kid growing up, I was more interested in Gershwin and big band music than the Top Forty. And I listened to operas, Carmen and Otello and others. There’s another side of this too, which is that I grew up watching MGM musicals on TV. I remember seeing Singing in the Rain when I was thirteen or fourteen and I thought that was terrific.”

Did you express an interest in musical theater while at the University of Chicago?

“I didn’t even go that far. I thought that I would be an outcast if I mentioned it so I didn’t even bring it up. But that is typical of my personality. I just assumed that no one would be encouraging about it so I didn’t assert myself. Plus, it was beside the point then. There was so much to learn in the fundamentals of harmony, orchestration, counterpoint and other theory.

Jeff McCarthy as Officer Lockstock and Spencer Kayden as Little Sally in the Broadway production of Urinetown. Photo © Joan Marcus.

“My teachers at the University of Chicago were Shulamit Ran, who taught me composition and analysis, and Easley Blackwood, who was my harmony and orchestration teacher. Shulamit was definitely into serialism. Easley, at that time, was into microtonal etudes. Neither of those interested me compositionally. They didn’t inspire me and I had no interest in writing that kind of music. With all due respect and thanks to them for the fundamentals I learned from them, my experience in a very academic music department convinced me that that was not where my future was.

“One nice thing that happened when I graduated from University of Chicago was that I won a small cash award as a result of my acting roles in the college theater. It enabled me to not get a job for six months and so beginning in November 1985, I started writing my first musical. The musical ended up taking a year-and-a-half and I took a job as a file clerk in a medical clinic to support myself, but it ended up getting a production at the student theater at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1987. It was called Kabooooom! I wrote it with a playwright, Mary DeSalle Kevern, who kindly adapted her two-act comedy into a musical-comedy book. Without knowing anything about musicals really, except what I had seen of them through movies and a few amateur productions, we got it on stage. It was not very good, but it was an important first step for me. A musician friend who listened to the first draft commented that I must love Rodgers and Hammerstein. I didn’t really think that I did, but I suppose it's true. We sang medleys of Rodgers and Hammerstein scores in high school choir and played transcriptions in band, so I guess that was the influence. Another influence that occurs to me, especially with Kabooooom!, is the musical Lil' Abner. Its composer, Gene DePaul, also wrote the score to Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which I think is a great sort of country/western score with not an unhummable tune in it.

“Going forward, my next show was Complaining Well, based on an ancient Greek comedy, The Dyskolos (The Grouch), by Menander. At that time I was listening to Stephen Sondheim and was very much influenced by A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. So I was writing in more staccato rhythms and I was definitely aping Sondheim as a lyricist in those days because I was trying very hard to be clever, especially with the comedy lyrics I was writing. But I was coming under the influence of William Russo at that time and he recommended against listening to Sondheim. I don’t remember if he told me the reasoning behind his advice, but now I understand. I really respect Sondheim in all ways. He is without parallel among contemporary musical theater writers. However, I think Bill was telling me that Sondheim was not the one to follow as a melodist, even though he has come up with some great melodies. I took the advice and started paying more attention to strict melody. I had this thing that I jokingly called “pianoitis.” It was the instrument I grew up with and I think as a composer I was very influenced by the piano. That comes with a trap of playing full chords with both hands and having all this sound come out that has nothing to do with melody; it’s all harmony. Part of what Bill Russo did was to break me of that and to get me back to a single melodic line. That was a revelation for me because I realized that everything comes from that melody line; it’s the bones of everything you do as a musical theater composer, so you have to get good at that first.

“The next score I wrote was Jack the Chipper, a murder-mystery musical that was written with a playwright named Nancy Crist, who co-wrote the lyrics with me. There, maybe, I was getting away from Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Sondheim, and I was trying to write a decent musical comedy score. It was actually kind of a mish-mash and it got bad reviews and the production lost all of its investment. That was the story of my life, though, leading up to Urinetown. If they got produced, it was on an amateur scale.

“To put it together though, by the time I started working with Greg on Urinetown, I had started working as a church organist and we were meeting in my church after our Sunday services to work on the piece, so I think the church influence was making itself heard in Urinetown. There’s a hymn at the end of it, “I See a River,” and there’s a gospel number earlier in the second act, which is nothing like the Lutheran church music I was playing, but it was in the ballpark. Urinetown was the first time I was able to fully bring my choral-writing skills to bear on a score. The grandness of the story in Urinetown called for ensemble numbers in four-part harmony. When I hear the score now, I think those choral sections provide some of the more thrilling moments. And the subject matter that Greg had come up with definitely brought to mind Weill and Three Penny Opera and [Marc Blitzstein’s] Cradle Will Rock.

“Greg and I first collaborated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when we were both coming of age artistically in our twenties as ensemble members of the Cardiff Giant Theater Company, a now-defunct improvisational theater troupe in Chicago. As actor/playwrights in Cardiff Giant, we and our fellow ensemble members wrote, acted in, directed, and produced five full-length plays and two full-length musicals. Over the course of about seven years as an active group, Cardiff Giant developed a distinct style of dark comedy, with characters playing out often-absurd situations in a familiar, yet not specifically identifiable, world. I think the improv is a vital part of what helped us write Urinetown. In addition to working with Cardiff Giant, I had branched out to play the trombone for Maestro Subgum and the Whole, a highly theatrical but mostly indescribable cabaret/art-rock band.”

Your musical influences and experiences are a uniquely American combination: opera, jazz, hymns, Hollywood and Broadway musicals.

“I think there are a lot of things from my background that came together in writing Urinetown. When I was in Chicago I ended up being sort of a jack-of-all-trades and around the time I turned 30 that was starting to worry me. I was good at a lot of different things and I was not making much of living from any of them. Music jobs were the best I could do and I was paying rent from them. But when I moved to New York, I wanted to get away from being an actor and an improv group member and even a piano player. New York offered me the chance to reinvent myself as a musical theater composer and lyricist.”

Is being entertaining important to you?

“It is paramount. I think that is at the top of my list. Holding an audience is totally necessary. I get that in part from my background as an actor. I have spent enough time on stage to know when an audience is with me and when they’re not and I have always been worried about that in writing music for the theater. I’m always concerned about what is happening in the moment and whether it has the full attention of the audience and whether it is compelling and is moving the story forward. There has never been a reason for me to look down my nose at being entertaining. I guess I’ve always worried about not being entertaining. But that goes back to melody-writing also and the importance of writing tunes that people can remember. I strive to develop the melodies so that there is economy in the material and unity in the whole score.

“I have always believed in being able to remember the score you’ve just heard in the theater. That is an important benchmark for me and that is what I have aspired to. It is an important way of entertaining. On the other hand, you can’t worry too much about the audience. One thing Greg is fond of saying about Urinetown is that we didn’t expect anybody to see it. We went through a round of getting thoroughly rejected by producers and agents in 1998 and 1999. Of course, we had hope that someone would find value in it, but our background was as self-producers. We were on the outside in Chicago, in that we had no connections to commercial producers or the large, institutional theaters, so we produced our own shows in storefront theaters. Based on that underground-theater background, we didn’t care so much about pleasing a wide segment of a theater audience. But when it comes down to writing a song that is supposed to work in the theater, I think very much about that. Maybe the distinction is that the story we were telling in Urinetown didn’t seem very commercial and we didn’t really care about that. At the time I certainly never thought we would sell it to a commercial producer. I assumed we would have to find a nice not-for-profit theater that would be willing to take this strange project under its wing. The irony of it was that commercial producers discovered and optioned and produced it.”

What does the future hold A.U. (After Urinetown)?

“We’re getting a healthy number of offers and having to make some hard decisions about what to turn down. We have two projects immediately before us. One is a new, original musical very much in the style of Urinetown, which we finished in first-draft form last month. In May, in my living room, Greg and I did a reading of it for the director and choreographer of Urinetown and they gave us their comments. We're working to mount some sort of a staged reading by the end of this year, I hope. We’re not talking too much about it, but I think of it as a prequel to Urinetown. It deals with some of the same issues of survival, but it’s set at the beginning of the creation of the world. It feels very much like Urinetown did back when we finished the first draft back in 1998. It’s very rough and I think it would flop miserably if someone produced it tomorrow. We have significant rewrites to do on it.

The other thing is that we’ve been asked to write music and lyrics for a stage musical based on The Man in the White Suit. It's an early 1950s Alex Guinness film about a man who invents a cloth that can never be torn and can never get dirty, and the threat that this invention poses to the textile industry. We’re working with Austin Pendleton, who is best known as an actor but who is also a terrific playwright. He is writing the book and Ann Reinking is directing and choreographing it. We hope to have a first draft of it within six to twelve months.”

In his written introduction that appears in the printed score for Urinetown, Mark traces the show’s progress. The following is an excerpt:

I believed from the moment I heard it that the premise for Urinetown was one of the best with which I had ever been presented. Yes, the title made me nervous, but my many years in the fringe-performing-arts scene in Chicago-a background I share with Greg-had opened my small-town Midwestern boy’s mind to what I once might have thought taboo.

As composer and lyricist for our brand-new collaboration, I had two immediate tasks: to start setting a tone or style for the music of the score and to find the places in Greg’s script that could be turned into songs. Although Greg eventually joined me in writing lyrics, I always felt that spotting songs was mainly my job. At this point, in the late spring of 1996, not much of a script existed, and Greg would not complete a full first draft until late 1997. From the first few pages he gave me, however, I was able to get a handle on a style and could easily spot a terrific song opportunity.

It came in a scene early in Act I, wherein we meet Penelope Pennywise, a hard-bitten matron of the filthiest urinal in town. In this moment she is reading the riot act to the downtrodden customers of her Public Amenity #9. It reminded me of a song from The Three Penny Opera, the 1928 musical theater masterpiece by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. The song is “The Morning Hymn of Peachum,” Mr. Peachum’s wake-up call to his company of beggars. Brecht’s opening lyrics for Peachum, which translate as “Wake up, you rotting Christians,” and which Weill set with a craftily repetitive melody and droning accompaniment, convey to me a man long convinced that the world is a fraud and wearily resigned to his place in it.

Like Ms. Pennywise, Peachum is delivering the message that all is not right in the world, and as he does, we understand that he would rather deliver this message than hear it himself. I made Pennywise’s “It’s a Privilege to Pee” faster and more martial than Peachum’s “Morning Hymn,” but the stark, unapologetically dim worldview of Peachum helped me believe that Penny’s song was possible. In both cases, it is the singer’s righteous duty to tell the truth as they see it, and to lay down the law, hard.

When I finished a first draft of the music and lyrics of “It’s a Privilege to Pee,” I called Greg and invited him to hear it. We met at Christ Lutheran Church on East Nineteenth Street in Manhattan, where I served as organist. Sitting at the piano in the sanctuary, amid stained-glass windows depicting scenes from the Bible and tile mosaics portraying the saints, I played and sang Penny’s rant, which got Greg laughing in appreciation. Laughter would become a barometer for us: if I laughed spontaneously at Greg’s writing or he at mine, whatever got us laughing would usually stay in the show. That evening, I could tell from Greg’s laughter that this song clicked with his vision for Urinetown and that we were on to something.

In June 1998, after several months of Sunday writing sessions at the church, I at the piano with my music paper, Greg sprawled out on the altar steps nearby with his notepad, and both of us with our rhyming dictionaries and thesauruses on hand, we had a complete first draft with songs.

The teachers in my musical-theater writing workshops had encouraged me to think in terms of professional productions for my work. Armed with information and advice from Dramatists Guild newsletters and The Dramatists Sourcebook, I suggested to Greg that we aggressively market Urinetown to potential producers and agents. I believed so strongly in the material that I was confident it would be worth the effort.

Over a hundred rejection letters later (ranging from polite brush-off to the more insistent please-don’t-contact-us-again brush-off), our Chicago fringe do-it-yourself background gave us the practical experience we needed to produce Urinetown ourselves at the 1999 New York International Fringe Festival, also known as FringeNYC. Any disappointment we felt at the utter failure of our attempt to break into the world of legitimate theater with Urinetown would turn out to have been premature. At FringeNYC, to our great surprise, Urinetown met with immediate success. Soon Greg and I found that our minority of two was growing. We went from packed houses Off-Off-Broadway at our FringeNYC venue on Stanton Street to an Off-Broadway production at the American Theatre of Actors in May 2001, and finally, improbably, to Broadway’s Henry Miller Theatre in September 2001.

I will never forget the sound, at the first Broadway preview, of six hundred people laughing at one of Greg’s lines at the start of Act I. Since Chicago storefront theaters typically seat only sixty or seventy people, neither of us had ever heard that large an audience appreciating our writing. It was a thrilling vindication of Greg’s vision. it was also the first overwhelming sign we had that, if polled, even Broadway was willing to say a resounding YES to Urinetown.

Mark Hollmann
Paris
July 24, 2002

Urinetown in rehearsal

Tom Hewitt as Officer Lockstock.

Ron Holgate as Caldwell B. Cladwell and company. Photos © Joan Marcus.