Urinetown Creators Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann on a World Circling the Drain

A few months back, the Encores! revival of Ragtime was rapturously, cathartically received at New York City Center. Audiences were visibly, deeply moved by the show’s belief in an America that might one day fulfill its highest ideals.

This week, all that hope and idealism goes straight down the toilet.

Debuting at the New York International Fringe Festival in 1999, Urinetown opened at Broadway's Henry Miller Theatre in 2001. Set in a dystopian future in which a severe water shortage has led to the privatization of public restrooms, the musical may seem, at first flush, as grossly outlandish as its title. But the themes the show wrestles with—authoritarianism and state control, the suppression of dissent, unchecked capitalism and corporate greed, economic inequality, unsustainable consumption, the illusion of democracy and progress—may have been ripped from today’s social media feeds or editorial pages.

As its unruly mob shout-sings, “What is Urinetown? Urinetown is here! It's the town wherever people learn to live in fear.”

Ahead of the opening of the Encores! revival—starring Jordan Fisher, Greg Hildreth, Keala Settle, Stephanie Styles, Christopher Fitzgerald and Rainn Wilson—show creators Greg Kotis (book/lyrics) and Mark Hollmann (music/lyrics) spoke about creating a Broadway musical driven by despair, taking inspiration from riot-inciting theater, contrasting reactions from the musical theater community and the resonance of Urinetown in 2025.

I don’t normally kick off interviews by discussing 9/11. But it’s interesting to me that the narrative around Broadway bouncing back after that event tends to center around Mamma Mia!—while of course Urinetown opened around the same time. What was that like?

MARK HOLLMANN: We were actually the first Broadway show to open following 9/11. On that opening night, it felt very much like a Broadway community was rallying around the show. You could feel the support. And I remember people saying that the darkness of the show actually helped. It was my first and only Broadway opening night. So it was special for a lot of reasons, but in context of what had just happened, it seemed to have more meaning.

The show debuted at the International Fringe Festival. What was your reaction when a Broadway run was first presented as a possibility?

GREG KOTIS: I mean, it was inconceivable. Even the run off-Broadway at the American Theatre of Actors was more than I ever expected for this show, really. I had been doing experimental storefront theater for 10, 12 years or so. I had abandoned hopes of getting paid for doing theater. Urinetown was, for me, sort of a last, “Let’s do this one show. Let's do it for ourselves. Let's do it for each other. Let's have the best show that we can, have the best time that we can, declare victory and pull out.”

Little Sally [the show's quasi-narrator] has a line where she goes, “I don't think too many people will come see this musical.” That was written with the full expectation that no one was going to see it. Because that had been our experience for so many shows where we performed for four or eight people. And we probably knew all of them. That was the reality that I knew. But through the series of unbelievable accidents and good fortune, and I guess good preparation in terms of the craft that went into the creation of the piece, we tumbled forward.

You mentioned having the support of the Broadway community. But there was some hostility towards the show from some corners. I hear there was one musical theater luminary in particular…

MARK: I heard that Sondheim didn't like our show.

Some people definitely thought you were mocking the form.

MARK: People were offended by our parodying the form. I'm a huge fan of the form. I think we're doing both a parody and an homage. At least it feels that way to me. I've never thought poorly of musical theater. I’ve known it’s what I wanted to do with my life since college.

Was there anything happening in the ’90s, politically, that Urinetown was speaking to or in dialogue with? Or did you think of yourselves as tackling more timeless and universal themes?

GREG: I think both. I started thinking about the show in 1995, and that same year I moved to New York. During ’95, ’96, when we were working on the show, I was working as a location scout for the TV show Law and Order. As a location scout, you are exposed to the very high and rich and very desperate. You walk into homes on Central Park South and get the view of their wraparound balconies that look over the city. And then you also are exposed to squats for the most desperate people in the city. The class division was very much on my mind during those few years.

Also as a scout, you're in your car 8, 12, 14 hours a day just driving around everywhere that you might find a location, seeing the post-industrial sprawl of this megalopolis which is New York City. Just the impact that New York City as an extreme example of the impact of human beings on the planet and the environment. The improbability—not the impossibility but the improbability—that we could somehow reverse course was on my mind in those years. That despair was energizing the project.

How did you muster the courage to deny the characters and to deny audiences the optimism and hope that's typically associated with the Broadway musical as a form?

GREG: It goes to the notion that this was a show that no one would see. We were liberated from expectations of what a musical should be. It's a comedy, obviously, but it was like, okay, let's really be disciplined about how we tell the story of this dystopian, collapsed world—and these characters trying to contend with it. This is how people behave in a crisis. We wanted to be true to that.

How does the comedy serve the didacticism of the show, do you think? One review I read, of the London production by Jamie Lloyd, suggested that the comedy undercuts the themes and the big issues of the show.

GREG: The comedy is so necessary, I think. It's the only way into that kind of darkness. It's gallows humor. I'm a believer—and many people have said it a million times—that truth is the foundation of comedy. The humor is just a way of highlighting and exposing these political and social truths. It’s really an attempt to start at a place of truth and then find the laughs within that.

How did the meta, self-referential element emerge?

GREG: I was part of a company called The Neo-Futurists. What I absorbed from them is the idea of deconstructing the work as you are presenting the work and always finding opportunities to eliminate the distance between the people on stage and the people in the audience. A lot of the complaints that Little Sally has about the show—those were actual notes that we had gotten. I didn't have any smart solution to how to deliver the exposition, for example, more efficiently. I didn't have a solution for a better title or a better subject matter. There’s tremendous entertainment value and dramatic power in calling things what they are.

Mark, how is the score sounding in the rehearsal room? I understand that the Encores! production will have new orchestrations by Bruce Coughlin and a bigger sound. I actually really love the skeletal, scrawny sound of the original.

MARK: Oh, I like that scrawny sound too. I've heard it compared to the orchestration Stravinsky did for L'Histoire du soldat. A ragtag band of instruments—that's what Bruce was aiming for. Now he's added a reed, a trumpet and a tuba, I believe. I don't think we've lost the scrappiness—the sort of almost pathetic sounding poverty of sound, let's say— because I think that we have to have that. That actually illustrates the world of the poor in our show. But these three added instruments actually help give it some heft in its more dramatic moments where you feel like, oh, yeah, in spite of the poor theater aesthetics of this show, there's a kind of monumental sound to it sometimes that serves us well.

How did you decide that the Brecht-Weill musical mode was right for Urinetown?

MARK: I’d always wanted to write a musical that's kind of like Threepenny Opera—that has a social consciousness. I don't mean to sound this pretentious. But I wanted it to be entertaining as well as to mean something. Threepenny caused its opening-night audience in Berlin to riot. That was exciting to me as a young person.

In college, I also came into contact with the musical The Cradle Will Rock, which was produced under very unusual circumstances: The WPA Theater Project shut it down, and they found a theater in New York City that they could rent for a night and put it on anyway. That caught my imagination as well.

Those two shows came to mind when Greg presented me with the premise for Urinetown. It just had so much of what animates those two shows. It’s about real unrest in the world and characters trying to grapple with it.

You touched on the darkness of the show resonating with audiences in the volatile time after 9/11. The timing of this new production is really something, again. Your characters sing that Urinetown is wherever people learn to live in fear. Is Urinetown America?

GREG: I've been sitting in rehearsal and I've been asking myself the same question. I think we're at a moment where we... To me it feels like a very disorienting moment. Now feels more disorienting even than 2016, in some ways. So I think that is the question on my mind. I'm imagining that's the question on everybody's mind, regardless of your politics perhaps. Urinetown, I guess at its best, is an invitation to sort of consider that question.