Urinetown

1	Urinetown, musical play~Overture 1:14
2	Urinetown, musical play~Too Much Exposition / Victor W. Hawks 3:15
3	Urinetown, musical play~Urinetown / Victor W. Hawks 1:40
4	Urinetown, musical play~It's a Privilege to Pee / Megan Lawrence 3:47
5	Urinetown, musical play~Mr. Cladwell / Lawrence Street 2:43
6	Urinetown, musical play~Cop Song / Lawrence Street 2:43
7	Urinetown, musical play~Follow Your Heart 4:47
8	Urinetown, musical play~Look at the Sky / Megan Lawrence 3:14
9	Urinetown, musical play~Don't Be the Bunny / Jennifer L. Thompson 3:02
10	Urinetown, musical play~Act One Finale / Deyle 6:28
11	Urinetown, musical play~What is Urinetown? / Victor W. Hawks 3:33
12	Urinetown, musical play~Snuff That Girl 3:18
13	Urinetown, musical play~Run, Freedom, Run! / Lawrence Street 2:50
14	Urinetown, musical play~Why Did I Listen to That Man? / Lawrence Street 3:08
15	Urinetown, musical play~Tell Her I Love Her / Lawrence Street 2:56
16	Urinetown, musical play~We're Not Sorry / Victor W. Hawks 1:56
17	Urinetown, musical play~We're Not Sorry-Reprise / John Cullum 0:39
18	Urinetown, musical play~I See a River 4:47

Barnes & Noble

Urinetown, the new musical with the notorious title, is this season's dark-horse hit. A bleak but highly theatrical fable about a city that rations water so severely that people are barred from using their own toilets and must pay to relieve themselves, was a succès de scandale off-Broadway and inexorably moved to the Great White Way. With echoes of The Threepenny Opera and West Side Story, Urinetown is campy good fun, and this excellent recording crisply wrings every drop of caustic humor from newcomer Mark Hollman's colorful music and trenchant lyrics. A terrific cast headed by John Cullum, Jeff McCarthy, and Spencer Kayden makes the most of the tuneful score, which includes the showstoppers "Run, Freedom, Run!," "Follow Your Heart," and "I See a River." Urinetown, the little musical that could, is flush with talent and joie de vivre. David Cohen

All Music Guide

If your first reaction on hearing about a musical called Urinetown is that that's an awful title, don't worry, the authors are way ahead of you. Its awfulness is the point, and Urinetown is as much a musical about a musical as it is, well, a musical. The opening song, for example, is called "Too Much Exposition," and in it, Officer Lockstock (Jeff McCarthy), who acts as the narrator, explains "the central conceit of the show," which is that, in a mythical town suffering a drought, "everyone has to use public bathrooms" and pay high fees, a story line Little Sally (Spencer Kayden) describes as "bad subject matter." Urinetown might as well be called "Allegory-ville," you see, even though that wouldn't be as repulsive -- and therefore as provocative -- a title. Lyricist/librettist Greg Kotis clearly has spent a lot of time studying Bertolt Brecht, and composer/co-lyricist Mark Hollmann is a big fan of Kurt Weill, so that Urinetown's clear antecedents are shows like The Threepenny Opera and Weill/Brecht disciple Mark Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock. The story is about the evil rich and the hapless poor, and the authors draw equally from the Depression era of the 1930s and the naïve idealism of the early '60s, casting several of their songs in the folk/gospel style of the freedom songs of the civil rights movement. But they also have absorbed a heavy dollop of the political cynicism of the late '60s; another obvious influence is Frank Zappa, especially in his own unproduceable anti-musical, Thing-Fish. But it's one thing to have all those influences, and it's another to write up to their level, which, amazingly, Kotis and Hollmann have done. Title, subject matter, and attitude aside, Urinetown is full of inventive melodies and clever lyrics, and they easily put over its smirking nihilism. William Ruhlmann