Immersive Theatre

As we have already discussed, Urinetown had its Broadway opening in Henry Miller's Theatre on West 43rd Street in the fall of 2001.  It closed in the fall of 2004 after a successful run of 965 performances.  And it was the last show to be performed on the Henry Miller stage before this theatre was torn down.

Set for One, Two Three, Henry Miller's Theatre, 1930

Actually,  Henry Miller's Theatre had sort of a complicated history before Urinetown moved in. The theatre was originally constructed way back in 1918, the design of an actor named Henry Miller (not the same guy who wrote Tropic of Cancer).  It enjoyed its golden years between 1930 and 1960, but after that was only used sporadically, and began to fall into disrepair.  It closed in the 1960s, and became a porno film theatre for a while called Avon on the Hudson. In 1978 it became a discotheque named Xenon, and in the mid-eighties, a dance club called Shout. By this time, the space was incredibly dilapidated; the theatre walls had been stripped down to their base, and all of the electrical and plumbing conduits were visible against a stained and blackened background.

This wasn't the type of theatre that patrons expect to see when paying top dollar for a Broadway show, but the Roundabout theatre company opened its production of Cabaret there in 1998, keeping all of the disgusting ambiance intact.  It seemed to work with the theme of the show. Roundabout followed that with their Broadway incarnation of Urinetown, which was even more at home in the wreckage that the Henry Miller theatre had become.

It was here that I first saw the show, and when I first walked in I assumed that the theatre designers had completely redone the house with faux finishes to match the grime of the Urinetown set.  I actually walked over and inspected the wall, trying to figure out how they had replicated the look of a dilapidated theatre so realistically.  I didn't realize until later that it was all real.

The ruins of the Henry Miller were a happy accident for Urinetown, but once in a while, a Broadway house will be reconstructed to immerse the audience more fully in the setting for a particular production.  This famously was the case for the production of Cats, which opened in the Winter Garden Theatre in 1982. The designer, John Napier, wanted the audience to feel completely immersed in the atmosphere of the junkyard where the cats congregated.  So he constructed an oversized-scale version of the junkyard (giant tires, milk crates, etc.) that extended well into the house, and surrounded several sections of seats, making the audience feel the same size as the dancing cats they were about to see.

We can't spray paint the entire house of the Brooks auditorium, but there are still some things we plan to do to increase the immersive experience of Urinetown for our audiences.  To begin with, our lighting will be somewhat dimmer (not completely dark) as the crowds enter, to accentuate the fact that searchlights will occasionally be used to make sure that our audiences are behaving themselves, and to weed out the dissidents.  We won't have an optimistic audio track of previous BRAVO shows playing in the background; instead, we'll hear only the occasional echoing dripping sounds from the inside of a sewer, punctuated by the occasional totalitarian directive issued by loudspeaker.  And we plan to use both Lockstock and Barrel as "ushers" of a sort, maintaining order, and dispensing some gentle police brutality where appropriate.

Eventually, the 57-story Bank of America Tower was constructed in the former footprint of the Henry Miller theatre, and a brand new Broadway house was constructed on the first floors of the building, christened the Stephen Sondheim Theatre.  The old facade of the Henry Miller is the only piece of the original structure that remains.

Learn to Laugh

In the fall of 2001, I was directing a particularly broad-humored version of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, 1885.  I like to direct Gilbert and Sullivan with high energy, and very physical humor, with virtually no joke considered too crass to include (in a way that I firmly believe Gilbert and Sullivan would approve of, were they alive today.  But don't try to tell that to any of the local Gilbert & Sullivan societies, which generally do not hold me in high regard.)  As an example of the delicate humor I used in this exquisite little operetta, I dressed one of my stage crew as a Sumo wrestler (with a gigantic flesh-colored fat suit, and loin cloth), and had him bend over deeply to pick up a prop onstage, mooning the audience and showing some significant fat-suit crack in the process.  This wasn't Noel Coward.

The Tuesday before tech week was the 11th of September, 2001.  You don't need me to remind you of the events of that day.  I cancelled our rehearsal that night, over the objections of some of the cast members who were accustomed to my never cancelling a rehearsal for virtually any reason.  But these were early days, and the enormity of what had just happened hadn't yet universally sunk in.  We resumed rehearsals the next night, but found it difficult to achieve the level of silliness we needed, given the preoccupations of everyone's minds.  I addressed the cast on that first day back, something about "not letting the terrorists win", which was, of course, complete nonsense -- the terrorists already had a huge win, and almost certainly didn't give a crap about our little North Shore production of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta.

On opening night, I was asked to give a short speech to the VIP crowd that was having cocktails in the lounge next to the theatre.  Again, I felt I needed to address the dreaded 9/11 question somehow - it was difficult in those days to have a conversation and not address it - and I was at sea for what to say.  Was it even appropriate to be attending a frivolous comedy?  I ended up with some pablum about moving on, and learning to laugh, and I'm embarrassed to even recall the speech.  In the end, I didn't need to say a word - the audiences laughed uproariously all by themselves, even at the butt jokes.

Do you remember being told, after David Letterman went back on the air with the Late Show less than week after 9/11, how Dave "taught us all how to laugh again"?  Crap.  I don't know about you, but I didn't need to learn how to laugh again from anybody, and neither did you. Humor is inextricably woven right into the human condition, and we laugh all the time at "inappropriate" moments.

We laugh during Saturday Night Live while hundreds are being gunned down in the Sudan. We laugh having a drink with our friends, while thousands of children under the age of five die of starvation.  We laugh at political jokes, and religious jokes, and blonde jokes, and even urine jokes, all while simultaneously, other people are experiencing the most abject misery possible. Is that inappropriate?  Maybe, but I am absolutely convinced that it is also completely necessary.  Humor is the relief valve that all humans use to laugh off the suffering which goes on every single day.  It stops our pathetic brains from overheating with empathy.  It is a sign and signal of being human.

If there is one (and possibly only one) noble thing about the original Urinetown production in New York, it is the timing of their Broadway opening.  Urinetown was one of the very few off-Broadway productions successful enough to move to an actual Broadway house (the Henry Miller Theatre) for a formal Broadway opening night:  September 13, 2001.

Needless to say, their opening night was cancelled, and all of Broadway went dark for a week.  But Urinetown finally opened on Broadway, and was the first show to do so post-9/11. Every single reviewer that night wrote about the timing of the opening -- and then raved about the hilarity of the production. Audiences loved it, and no one had to teach them how. Humor is always inappropriate; that's why it's so valuable.