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Theatre

Review: Urinetown (St James Theatre)

March 24, 2014 11:04

By

John Nathan,

John Nathan

1 min read

Let us put the deliberately off-putting title aside for a moment. When this satire by composer Mark Hollmann and writer Greg Kotis about corporate greed and environmental collapse opened on Broadway in 2001, it had a fan base that adored its subversion of the optimistic musical.

Its narrator is Officer Lockstock — played with sadistic menace by Jonathan Slinger — who lectures his gratuitously cute sidekick Little Sally about the principles of plot within the framework of musicals. They loved the darkness of the story set in a future metropolis where there’s a fee to pee and those who cannot afford it are sent into exile, or worse. Even the ending, which is about as upbeat as Hamlet, didn’t put them off.

But Jamie Lloyd’s new British cast version is even darker than the Broadway original.

So dark that, for some, the balance may tilt a tad too far from musical comedy and too near plain nasty. Slinger’s Lockstock is a dislikeable thug and no punches are pulled in depicting police brutality.