Urinetown

A title to repel any audience. Well...my first instinct to skip this show was at least partly right. Urinetown is a mildly amusing one-joke show with good professional performances in a silly, sometimes campy, sitcom with one slightly off-color bathroom joke: you have to pay to pee. The audience laughs on cue. It's great to see John Cullum do the Bunny song, and the romantic leads -- Jennifer Laura Thompson and Hunter Foster -- are fine singers and actors, as are the rest of the cast. The Fosse dance takeoff and faux folksong "Freedom" in Act II give a needed lift to the proceedings. But the totality attempts a spoof that only sometimes works and has, for me, an unsavory flavor. Director John Rando does as much as one can with the material, and Urinetown is getting large, enthusiastic audiences. Dumb bathroom jokes often do -- but must they on Broadway?