Review: Urinetown at Liberty Theatre
Urinetown at Liberty Theatre
Saturday, November 8, 2025
Hail Malthus!
Still buzzing from Strange Ball’s reclamation of the Liberty’s faded glamour, Urinetown marched in and doubled down on the venue’s yesteryear grit. A five-piece band squeezed into a corner, Gestapo-ish cops with torches stalked the aisles, and citizens adorned in rag-picker mash-up—’30s breadline meets Mad Max op-shop chic. Hair was either slicked to an oily sheen or teased into bird-nest delirium; everywhere, the rank perfume of desperation. The Liberty, with a splash of garish fluoro pink on the walls, proved a gift for work like this—an under-the-surface space for a show about what festers under polite society.
From the jump, the jokes landed. Centred on Public Amenity #9—the “bad part of town”—we were guided through a dystopian (future? present?) world where peeing cost coin and bodily autonomy had been privatised. The meta-banter between Officer Lockstock (Nick Maclaine) and Little Sally (Madeleine Shaw) flagged twists, skewered musical-theatre tropes and warned that too much exposition and a terrible title could sink a show; 20 years since its off-off-Broadway inception prefiguring uber-satire Book of Mormon, clearly it didn’t.
The huge chorus opener drew rapt applause—“You’re in town, you’re in good company”—and we were off. Ms Pennywise (Sharon Kiely), the madam of the pissoir with an absolute cannon of a voice, detonated It’s a Privilege to Pee, a glass-shattering delivery with plenty of grit and nuance. Moments later, Old Man Strong (Thomas Papathanassiou) was manhandled away for an illegal leak, pausing for a melodramatic farewell to his son Bobby that drew guilty titters.
Meanwhile, the production offered delicious low-fi flourishes. Golden “thrones” flanked the corporate HQ, while the toilets glowed in a jaundiced palette. A gentle blush of pink washed a romantic interlude; later, lurid magenta painted Bobby and Hope’s kiss to gleeful approval. Hope Cladwell (Izzi Green) soared to operatic peaks while Bobby Strong (Marshall Brown) crooned with easy, radio-friendly warmth—the contrast worked. A sheet was rigged as a shadow-play screen for a police raid (a touch hard to parse narratively, but charming); the sheet was then redeployed to cleave the stage between boot-leather authority and ragamuffin resistance. A Les Mis-style flag waved upstage when the rabble embraced revolution, perfectly situated within the bowels of the Liberty, readymade for this company’s camp edge.
If you’ve done your Urinetown homework, the Brechtian scaffolding sat in plain sight. Corporate greed wrapped in civic piety. Law as hydraulics—literally the control of water—weaponised as social discipline. Price hikes were met with a communal kabuki “Gasp!”, while Bobby’s dumbfounded “But what if the law is wrong?” landed like a slap. The show revelled in pointing out its own theatricality. Little Sally grilling Officer Lockstock, the inevitability of a doomed love story, a running Rio gag that never tired, and a Larry David-worthy stare-down between cop and hero all kept the satire fizzy rather than didactic.
Act One’s knockout set piece, Don’t Be the Bunny, arrived as brothel-red cabaret-sleaze: predator economics crooned over a leering trombone while red lights flashed and bunnies dropped—Malthus with jazz hands. Choreography flirted with Weimar angles and Fosse silhouettes; the band punched jazzy breaks that kept the rhythm taut even as the politics curdled. Caldwell B. Cladwell (Chris McCafferty) and Pennywise’s lingering sexual charge got a spray of knowing laughs—revolutions are messy, and so are ex-lovers.
The Act One strobe-lit melee slowed to a ridiculous slow-motion collapse that had the crowd in stitches well into intermission; then we were yanked into Act Two by Lockstock’s droll narration. Amidst the Secret Hideout-cum-Fiddler homage, Hope proved less ingénue than emerging demagogue, while Sally—the resident truth-teller—dropped the line that unlocked the whole conceit: Urinetown isn’t a place so much as a metaphysical condition—how fear governs us. (And, for the record, no, the show’s not about plumbing; it’s about the math of scarcity.)
Casting fit like a glove. Brown’s Bobby was not so much a grandstanding lead as a big-hearted tradie-poet, overalls and a plunger in hand. Run, Freedom, Run! turned him full preacher, summoning a clap-along that bloomed into gospel harmony and pure toe-tapper joy. Maclaine’s Lockstock slid from fascistic enforcer to knowing narrator with sly precision. Shaw’s Sally was easily the crowd favourite with innocent charm in spades; Kiely’s Pennywise was a brassy moll with a bruised soul. McCafferty’s Cladwell utterly purred as the oily company man, “I’m not an evil man, just a simple man holding onto tomorrow,” before twisting the knife: “My conscience will cost you more than a pile of cash.” Satire that smiles while it shivs.
Staging continued to find small wins: Pennywise isolated in a single pool of light, trying to outrun her complicity; the chorus reconfiguring like a factory line; a quick, stylised rooftop dispatch of Bobby that was efficient and devastating. The five-piece never over insisted—music direction stayed crisp and propulsive while choreo snapped; Andrew Baker’s direction kept the story and gags as clean as one could amidst the Liberty grunge.
And then the kicker: ‘Hope’ rode in, voice with a radio-ready Adele-lite sheen, proclaiming a new age of compassion and free flow. The room may have wanted to believe, but Urinetown, being Urinetown, pulled the rug. Ill-fated short-sighted optimism without pragmatism is a death cult of its own. While the blinding sky glowed—the sun a giant heart glimpsed from the sewer grate—the show tied a neat bow on the paradox: revolution without resource logic is just another costume change.
Across two acts, the jokes kept coming—Sally’s aside that “not many people are going to watch this musical” got a big laugh—but the post-show question lingered: are we soothed by satire that flatters us or moved by satire that implicates us? With thrift-store ingenuity and Liberty-specific swagger, this production chose the latter—brassy, bleak and properly Brechtian; funny enough to seduce, sharp enough to sting.
On Barrack Street, beneath golden thrones and piss-lit cubicles, Urinetown reminded us that the real joke isn’t in the title. It’s in how easily we sing along while the taps run dry.
CAT LANDRO
Photos by Mark Flower Photography
