A Legal Matter

For those of you who appreciate legal issues, the history of Urinetown offers a unique and interesting chapter in theatrical litigation history. And it gives us an opportunity to think about the concept of plagiarism, especially as it relates to theatrical productions.

As most of you probably already know, the script and score for Broadway musicals aren't free; not only do you have to rent or purchase the scripts and vocal books for the show, you also have to pay for the right to do the show, typically in the form of royalties, some percentage of the ticket price your theatre will be charging. These royalties are paid to the original show's authors (or their estates) to compensate them for using their copyrighted work.

Music Theatre International (MTI) is the licensing agent for Urinetown.  That means that Ovation will be paying a sum of money to MTI for the right to mount this show here in Oak Park. Every single performance of Urinetown (outside the original Broadway production) is required to pay for these rights, and to acknowledge in its program that the original book and music were created by Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann.

In 2006, an unusual lawsuit was filed by the original creative team of Urinetown.  The year before, a Chicago production team purchased the licensing rights to perform Urinetown at the Mercury Theatre, one of the first professional productions of Urinetown to be mounted in Chicago.  The Chicago creative team used the same script and music, and produced a version of Urinetown that was very similar to the Broadway production, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale.

The Broadway creative team sued the Chicago team (and a similar production team in Ohio), arguing that the Chicago team had only purchased the rights to the script and music, but that they had essentially copied many other elements of the production as well:  choreography, costume design, lighting design, staging and direction.  No such lawsuit like this had ever before been filed.  This lawsuit made national news, and was followed very closely by the theatrical community.  If the federal court ruled that all of the ancillary production elements were also protected by copyright (even though no copyright had ever been issued for these elements), then the future of all non-Broadway theatre would be radically changed.

I have fairly strong opinions on this matter, as a director that wantonly steals (I mean, borrows) good ideas from other directors, choreographers, and designers.  In fact, I contend that it is impossible to recreate a faithful version of any Broadway show without some degree of replication of the original elements.  Broadway is more than just a script and score; it is a visual medium, and both the script and the score depend upon proper staging to make a show work.

Let's look at an example.  During the Act I finale of Urinetown, Bobby Strong rallies the crowds to revolt against the tyranny of the UGC corporation.  At a very specific moment, the music builds to a crescendo, and then breaks into a military march, with lyrics that would be at home in any revolutionary hymn. The music was deliberately written this way to accommodate a joke in the original staging.  At this moment, the crowds began waving signs, and replicated the stationary "march" from Les Miserables, complete with a waving red flag.  The Chicago production recreated the idea of the Les Miz march, and the Broadway team used this as evidence of blatant plagiarism of direction and choreography.

Was it?  The music clearly signals a revolutionary style at that point in the show, and it is clear that the music had been written to support this exact parody of Les Miz.  This moment gets one of the biggest laughs in the show.  Could it be staged in some other way?  Of course, but that misses the point.  If you want to produce Urinetown, wouldn't it be reasonable to capture all of its best parodies and jokes, including one joke skewering Les Miz, even if the Les Miz reference isn't explicitly indicated in the script?  I think yes.

If the federal court ruled against the Chicago team what would that mean?  Could you imaging staging Peter Pan without flying Peter through the central nursery windows? Giving Tracy Turnblad some other hairstyle than her iconic flip, or Annie without her final red perm?  Staging 42nd Street without tap dancing?  Joseph without a multi-colored coat? Theoretically, none of these would be possible (without additional licensing fees) if the Broadway team had a court rule in their favor.

It has long been understood that set designs are copyrighted materials, as are a show's script and score.  Copyrights are actually filed for these production elements by their creators, specifically in order to protect them.  Costume designers, lighting designers, choreographers, and directors have never filed copyrights for their work.  I think this is a clear indication that these elements were considered ripe for replication, and an obvious expectation on their creators' part.  The Chicago production team agreed with me, and argued to the court that since Urinetown was so full of theatrical parody, that it was impossible to produce without a certain degree of replication, and that these elements were not protected by copyright in any case.

I find it particularly ironic that the original production team of Urinetown, a show which blatantly steals from dozens of shows in an effort to parody them, judged themselves abused when their own work was in turn copied and interpreted.

I wish I could tell you who won the lawsuit, but I can't.  It settled out of court before a verdict could be reached, and so it remains anyone's guess whether or not these ancillary production elements can be considered to be protected intellectual property.  The legal community was disappointed in the result, but will simply have to wait for the next lawsuit to be filed.  In the meantime, watch out if you plan to steal any of Urinetown's original staging ideas (I do).

Fifty Shades of Gay

We've talked on now for a bit about the influences on Urinetown from both the African-American and Jewish-American traditions, so it's time to set our targets on another important minority group:  Homosexual-Americans.  I know that this is beginning to sound like the beginning of an incredibly offensive joke:  Into a bar walks a cripple, a black, two gays, and a Jew...

Gay men have comprised an inordinately high percentage of Broadway's singers, dancers, directors, choreographers and designers; it's difficult, if not impossible to ignore how Broadway itself addressed this issue, starting in the late 60s and early 70s.

It seems self-evident that if there is any place on earth that ought to be safe for a homosexual, it ought to be the Broadway stage.  And in many ways, that's true.  Broadway's treatment of homosexuality came out of the closet way earlier than that of either film or TV, but not always in the most progressive ways. Broadway's first openly gay character was that of Sebastian Baye in Coco, 1969.  A musical adaptation of the life of Coco Channel (starring Katherine Hepburn, of all people, in a musical), the show was poorly reviewed, and didn't last too long.  It may have been the first to feature a gay character, but as expected, Sebastian was portrayed in an incredibly hateful manner, as a stereotypical rude fashion designer.

This was followed the very next year by Applause, 1970 (another show you probably don't need to ever see), based upon the 1950 film All About Eve.  Here we meet Duane, a gay hairdresser, still playing to type, but at least this character was likeable. Applause starred another female film star not typically known for her vocal abilities:  Lauren Bacall.  And for you connoisseurs of gay stage history, Applause was also the first Broadway show to feature a scene set inside a gay bar.  Times, they was a-changin'.

A few years later, Tommy Tune won a Tony award for his portrayal of an openly gay choreographer in Seesaw, 1973, continuing our list of shows that you will probably never see, the omission of which should never bother you.  In the early 70s, a raft of shows with gay themes started to appear, but most of them were mounted off-Broadway, well outside the mainstream consciousness.  It wasn't until 1975 that the gay experience came crashing through the door of a genuine Broadway hit:  A Chorus Line.

A Chorus Line, 1975 was the first Broadway book musical to allow its gay characters to discuss, in both song and dialogue, the sexual aspects of their lives. Marvin Hamlisch's brainchild, the show portrays 17 dancers auditioning for a spot in the chorus of a Broadway production, and delves into each of their backstories.  It was groundbreaking at the time for showing both the joy and the heartbreak involved in living a life on the stage.  It ran for 15 years in the same theatre, and won a slew of awards.  To be gay was beginning to be mainstream, at least in the narrow world of Broadway.

But even A Chorus Line couldn't reasonably be called a gay show, though it featured some gay characters.  Charles Strouse and Alan Jay Lerner came a little closer with 1983's Dance A Little Closer, featuring Broadway's first romantic homosexual couple, who even exchange marriage vows.  The composer of Annie, and the lyricist of My Fair Lady;  I can hear you asking, "why haven't I heard of this show?"  Because Dance A Little Closer was dreadful, and it closed after one performance.  (During previews, it was known as Close A Little Faster.) 

Still, it had a few interesting songs that it seems a shame to waste.  In spite of the fact its opening night was its closing, somehow a cast recording still got made, even though it is out of print and hard to find. As a special treat, I give you the rarely heard, first gay duet performed on a Broadway stage, sung by a couple of male flight attendants in love (stereo-typing again).  Here's Why Can't the World Go and Leave Us Alone?:

In a way, it's a good thing that Dance A Little Closer closed so quickly; only a few short months later, Broadway debuted its first completely gay-themed musical, and this one was a hit:  La Cage Aux Folles, 1983, the Jerry Herman extravaganza.  For the first time, blue-haired ladies who never would have gone to see "gay theatre" cheered for the story of a middle-aged gay couple struggling with homophobic in-laws, and for the defiant gay anthem I Am What I Am. Watching George Hearn perform this song during the Tony Awards that year was one of the all-time electrifying moments in Broadway history, and I was glad to have seen it live.  Here's George for those that have never seen him perform this signal song:




After La Cage, a raft of shows opened on Broadway which contained gay themes, without apology. Falsettoland 1990; Kiss of the Spiderwoman, 1992; Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 1998; The Boy From Oz, 2003; Kinky Boots, 2012.  These musicals portrayed homosexuality as simply another facet in the complex prism of life, and never poked fun of gay men in an unflattering way.  I am pleased to say that Urinetown avoids this easy slandering as well, and some might not even notice the placement of at least one gay character among the groupies in Cladwell's retinue.  The script gives him no room to hide, however, as we have already discussed Urinetown's naming conventions, and we can easily identify the gay sycophant in the un-subtly named, McQueen.

Modern theatre so commonly includes gay themes today that Broadway has taken it upon itself to poke fun of its commonality.  Here's the opening number from the 2011 Tony Awards, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris.  Enjoy!

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.

Funny Valentine

Follow Your Heart takes the place of the requisite love duet in Urinetown, and its humor stems from the fact that all of the standard love cliches are considered literally: after claiming that Bobby needs to listen to his heart, Hope puts her ear right up to his chest to show him how. Bobby sings his own verse about following his heart, referencing all of the specific anatomy that's in play:  aortas, arteries, muscles, blood, etc.  The stark literalism here contrasts well with the unquestionably sweet melodies, and even more powerful harmonies at the end of the song. It's a beautiful love ballad sung by a pair so naive that they don't understand the meaning of metaphor.

Although this may seem like simply another example of the post-modern musical discarding the traditional saccharine of an Act I love duet, the standard American musical has a long history of making fun of their lovers.  Even theatregoers in the 1880s got sick of too many love songs, and humor has been used as a standard weapon against sickly sweetness for a very long time.

Although you may not regard them as American writers, I include Gilbert & Sullivan in this discussion because not only were each of their English operettas almost immediately reproduced here in the States, but they were often reproduced with an even sharper sense of humor, more in line with their American clientele.  An early example of sarcastic humor wearing the sheep's clothing of a love ballad is provided in Gilbert & Sullivan's Iolanthe, 1882, in which Phyllis tries hide her apathy of her upcoming nuptials from her intended: 

PHYLLIS:

Good lover, good-morrow!

I prithee discover

Steal, purchase, or borrow

Some means of concealing

The care you are feeling.

And join in a measure

Expressive of pleasure

For we're to be married to-day, to-day-

For we're to be married to-day.

STREPHON:  My Phyllis! And today we're to be made happy forever!

PHYLLIS:  Well, we're to be married.

Staying in the Gilbert & Sullivan vein for a moment, consider another of their works, Pirates of Penzance, 1879, for which I have a special affection, and which has worked its way many times into my performance and directing career.  Pirates offers another ridiculous take on the naivete of young love.  In Stay, Frederick, Stay, Frederick realizes that because of a contract loophole he will not officially come of age for another 60 years, and he asks his beloved to wait for him:

MABEL
But you are twenty-one!

FREDERICK
I've just discovered that I was born in leap-year,
And that birthday will not be reached by me till 1940.

MABEL
Oh, horrible! Catastrophe appalling!

FREDERICK
In 1940 I of age shall be;
I'll then return, and claim you — I declare it!

MABEL
It seems so long!



In the century to follow, lovers became less naive, and often found themselves at odds with one another, love or no.  In Annie Get Your Gun, 1946, a pair of engaged lovers have differing ideas on what their upcoming wedding will be like.  They sing these divergent opinions at the same time, creating harmony out of discord:

A similar themed happy disagreement is posed by Leonard Bernstein's Candide, 1956, in which Cunegonde and Candide imagine their future life together in Oh, Happy We!  Maybe too similar to the last example, but I can never resist including a video of Kristin Chenoweth --



In the modern era, lovers use humor not just to disagree, but to seduce.  City of Angels, 1989, pits a hardboiled P.I. against a femme fatale in a duet dripping with so much sexual innuendo, that there's not room for any actual romance.  Listen to a bit of The Tennis Song below:

To add the darkening shadow of post-modernism to the modern relationship (they're called relationships now), consider the following exchange between a couple working out the kinks of their relationship in Therapy, from Tick, Tick...Boom, 2001: 

SUSAN:

Are you saying we can't talk?

JONATHAN:

Are you saying we are not talking?

SUSAN:

What are you saying?

JONATHAN:

What are you saying?

I'm saying I feel bad, that you feel bad

About me feeling bad, about you feeling bad

About what I said, about what you said

About me not being able to share a feeling.

SUSAN:

If I thought that what you thought

Was that I hadn't thought about sharing my thoughts

Then my reaction to your reaction

To my reaction

Would have been more revealing.

Such openness in communication is so exhausting that it makes you nearly nostalgic for a good old-fashioned love ballad where the participants are simply lying to one another.  With Bobby and Hope, we strike a happy medium.

East Side, West Side

In 1947, Jerome Robbins approached Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents about developing a contemporary musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.  He proposed that the plot focus on the conflict between an Irish-Catholic family and a Jewish family living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, called East Side Story.  Ultimately, the three decided that it was simply the wrong time for a Broadway show about a Jewish conflict, and project was shelved.  It was more than five years later that the group revived the idea, brought in Stephen Sondheim as lyricist, and re-focused the plot on the tensions between white Polish-Americans and Puerto Rican immigrants on the West Side:  West Side Story.  Most modern audiences, when they see this show, are completely unaware of its roots in the Jewish immigrant tradition.

See if you can spot what the Broadway titans in the following list all have in common:

Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Herman, Sheldon Harnick, Jerry Bock, Richard Rogers, Oscar Hammerstein, Laurence Hart, John  Kander, Kurt Weill, Jule Styne, Charles Strouse, and Stephen Sondheim.

Yes, they're all of them of Jewish heritage.  In fact, it's pretty hard to come up with a famous Broadway composer in the 20th century who wasn't Jewish. Cole Porter, I suppose, and even he collaborated primarily with other Jews.  I'll leave it for the anthropologists to tell us why we find so many Jews in the musical comedy traditions in America; for us, it's enough to acknowledge their huge contribution, and of course, to instantly make fun of it:

Ironically, when Spamalot, 2005, made the move from Broadway to the West End in London, this song (You Won't Succeed on Broadway) had to be completely re-written, since the London stage has no such connection with the Jewish tradition.

For decades in the early part of the 20th century, the most prolific and famous Broadway composers were almost exclusively Jewish, starting way back with George Gershwin, and moving right up to the present day with the likes of Stephen Sondheim and Jason Robert Brown. Mel Brooks, one of the brightest comedic stars of both stage and screen, frequently pokes fun of his Jewish heritage in his work, not the least of which includes his Broadway smash hit, The Producers, 2001.  Its original opening number, The King of Broadway, is the most quintessentially Jewish song from the entire show:

It is in this strong tradition of Jewish folk song parodies that Act II of Urinetown opens, with its Klezmer orchestrations of What Is Urinetown?, an obvious allusion to Fiddler on the Roof, and its iconic Jerome Robbins' choreography.

When Fiddler first opened in 1964, it wasn't at all clear that the show would run for a year, much less become one of the longest-running shows on Broadway. After all, besides telling the story of a somewhat narrow and unknown group of people (the Russian Jews at the turn of the last century), Act I ends in a pogrom, and Act II ends in an exile, not good opportunities for big showstopping numbers. Nonetheless, the show found a universal appeal in its portrayal of tradition, and its relative importance in human lives.  Fiddler remains one of the few shows whose rights are available only to those groups willing to recreate the original choreography of the show as closely as possible - a fact that Urinetown does not ignore. Bits of Fiddler find their way into the choreography of What Is Urinetown? in most productions, and ours will be no exception.  Can anyone here dance while balancing a bottle on his head?

The success of Fiddler as an openly Jewish Broadway production (rather than a production simply staffed with Jewish artists) finally broke the ground necessary for the American musical theatre to address a difficult subject:  the rise of Nazi Germany, and its impact on the Jewish community. Cabaret, 1966, was penned by the team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, another Jewish power couple, who set their plot in the Kit Kat Club of 1931 Berlin. Throughout the show, the nightclub serves as a metaphor for the increasingly threatening Weimar Republic. The final stark conversion of the club's dim lighting into the famous Nuremberg lights is one of the most chilling moments in all of Broadway history.

Despite the fact the 20th century Jewish history gives us plenty of serious themes to deal with, the most significant Jewish contribution to the Broadway stage remains its sense of broad and insightful humor, often of the self-deprecating variety.  As a typical entrant in this category, I leave you with a snippet of Little Shop of Horrors, 1982, written by another Jewish contributor, Alan Menken, possibly my all-time favorite American composer:

A Urine Tax

Although Urinetown poses a supposedly far-fetched and ridiculous premise in its imposition of a fee for peeing, the actual history of that kind of taxation may surprise you.  The first Urine Tax in known history was first imposed by the Roman Emperor Vespasian, who ruled in the late first century.  Urine was known to contain several valuable chemicals (notably ammonia), which were used in the tanning and laundering industries at the time.  Urine was collected from the upper classes, and a tax was imposed on those who wished to purchase this valuable resource. 

The Urine Tax (or vectigal urinae, in the original Latin) was considered a disgusting policy by Vespasian's son, Titus. When Titus complained about it to his father, Vespasian was reported to have picked up a gold coin and remarked, "Pecunia non olet", or, "Money does not stink".  This was perhaps the most famous phrase ever spoken by Vespasian, and has remained with us ever since, now commonly spoken to downplay the questionable (or outright illegal) sources of financial gain.  [BTW:  Some of the original Urine Tax no doubt went toward the construction of the Roman Coliseum, which was built during Vespasian's 10-year reign.]

The Coliseum notwithstanding, Vespasian's contribution to modern architecture can be seen in one other notable way: because of his famous Urine Tax, public pay toilets in some parts of the French-speaking world became known as Vespaciens.  To the left is an example of a Vespacien built in Montreal in 1930. Although the concept of pay toilets is completely novel to most Americans, certainly those of your age, the concept of a fee for pee, is widespread throughout Europe's major cities (especially Paris).

While pay toilets are fairly rare in the United States today, we did go through a period, in the 1950s and 60s, during which they were very common.  The first recorded American establishment to install a pay toilet was "Walt's", a restaurant built on Hollywood Boulevard in 1935 by none other than Walt Disney.  From there, pay toilets spread throughout the country, most often located in bus stations and airports, places where their need was exceptionally strong (e.g., after a long trip) and the public was willing to pay the fee. Eventually they started popping up in department stores and shopping malls, which is where I think I saw my last American pay toilet when I was a boy.

By the 1970s, though, political unrest had begun to build, and a grassroots movement to ban the use of pay toilets began to grow. One of the largest organizations opposed to the use of pay toilets was the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America (or CEPTIA, I'm not making this up), founded by 19-year-old Ira Gessel:

When a man's or woman's natural body functions are restricted because he or she doesn't have a piece of change, there is no true freedom.               --  Ira Gessel

Freedom through complimentary urination.  Set that quote to music and you have another production number for Urinetown. I am proud to note that Chicago was the very first city to ban the use of pay toilets in 1973, and by the end of that decade pay toilets were virtually unknown in the U.S.  But take some change with you if you visit a train station in parts of Europe, where the act of using a public toilet became euphemistically known as "dropping a penny".

Happy Endings

After a week hiatus (here's hoping Finals Week went well for everyone), we're back, and will be posting frequently until rehearsal starts (three weeks away!). Hopefully, the school year ended (or is ending) happily for everyone.

Let us now segue from that sentiment to a broader discussion of happy endings, at least those that have typically been found in the traditional Broadway musical.  After World War II, the defining characteristic of the musicals penned in that Golden Era was unfettered optimism. Mirroring the general mood of the populace at the time, the Broadway musical affirmed what everyone already knew to be true; specifically, that

1.  Love is the answer, and

2.  Be true to yourself, and everything will work out fine.

I think that it is strongly arguable that virtually every single Broadway musical written in the middle decades of the 20th century was based upon either one, or both, of these maxims.  Just consider the playlist of these popular Broadway show tunes:

Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!, Oklahoma, 1943

Happy Talk, South Pacific, 1949

A Cockeyed Optimist, South Pacific, 1949

I Whistle a Happy Tune, The King & I, 1956

Everything's Comin' Up Roses, Gypsy, 1957

Put On a Happy Face, Bye Bye Birdie, 1960

Of course, in reality, the two happy maxims noted above are frequently found to be wanting. Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, so love is apparently not always the answer, and being true to yourself often gets you in a lot of hot water (think Edward Snowden).  Starting in the mid- to late-sixties, the general mood of the country turned sour, and Broadway started to embrace some darker themes, especially through the 1970s.

The crown prince of the depressing Broadway musical is surely Stephen Sondheim, whose amazing ability to craft complex and intricate lyrics and musical compositions will have to be discussed another time. Here, we'll focus on Sondheim's willingness to buck the trend, and deny the audience the happy ending they are hoping for:

Company, 1970:  You may never find a soulmate or experience true love.

Follies, 1971:  You may die old and alone, after living a lifetime of regret.

Sweeney Todd, 1979:  Everyone you love may be taken from you, and made into meat pies.

Sondheim went on to fashion what many people think is one of his defining works, Into the Woods, 1987, a musical which expressly sets out to dispel the myth of the fairly tale ending. Into the Woods features our favorite fairly tale characters being taught a series of true life lessons through songs titled, Agony, I Guess This is Goodbye, Witch's Lament, Your Fault, and No More.  This last song shows us a humble baker whose hopes and dreams have all been crushed by the reality of the world.  He begs the universe to free him of its endless torments, his own version of "crossing the river":

No more riddles, please.
No more jests.
No more curses you can't undo,
Left by fathers you never knew.
No more quests -

No more feeling -
Time to shut the door.
Just....no more.

Urinetown is almost the defining example of the post-modern Broadway musical.  Not only is Urinetown post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, and post-Gulf War, it also is quite literally the first musical to open on Broadway post-9/11.  It echos the social despair of the Sondheim musical, but without any of the thoughtful retrospection; instead, Urinetown beats us over the head and makes fun of us for being stupid enough to believe in true love in the first place.

We don't even make it to Intermission before one of our lovers kidnaps the other one for political leverage.  Our hero dies a brutal death alone, and without any sort of self-sacrifice that provides any benefit for those he leaves behind.  His former love interest takes up the mantle of bloody vengeance, with the intent of murdering her own father, and the entire cast suffers a crippling and fatal drought at the end of the show.  It almost makes Curly's admiration of corn as high as an elephant's eye seem trite by comparison.