In 1991, a tiny, now-defunct, weirdly named Chicago theater company called Cardiff Giant produced an original comedy musical about the diabolic marketing of a new brand of food. Created by a mad industrial scientist, the stuff was fatal to the gullible consumer: Eat three cans or more of it and you were dead.
Peppered with songs such as “Hair in My Ears” and “People are Dying to Buy It,” the memorably cynical show premiered in a tiny space at 1257 W. Loyola Ave. Tickets were $5. The wacky narrator was a character named Little Suzy.
It took a decade — and a pivotal change of address for Little Suzy to morph into Little Sally and win a Tony Award — for those $5 tickets to become trendy $90 Broadway ducats, for Cardiff Giant’s Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann to become two of the hottest young composers and writers in the country, and for Chicago’s “After Taste” to become a smash and uber-hip New York hit called “Urinetown.”
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As far as the New York media were concerned, both the show and its young creators had appeared either out of the New York Fringe Festival or out of nowhere, which amounted to much the same thing.
But the largely untold story of “Urinetown,” which speeds through Chicago for the next two weeks as if it were a road company of “Oklahoma!,” actually has very specific roots in two proudly diminutive but remarkably original North Side of Chicago theater companies. One is dead and one is still very much alive, but both companies’ aesthetic influence in the contemporary American theater far exceeds their institutional viability.
And deep in the tale of “Urinetown” lies the heart-breaking paradox of the Chicago theater. As with Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses,” the success of “Urinetown” is firm evidence that the kind of original work that goes on here in storefronts (even unlicensed storefronts) every season is the same kind of work that wins major awards elsewhere and is hailed in New York as revolutionary even 10 years after its Chicago creation.
And yet had “Urinetown” become a fringe Chicago musical — which it was inches away from becoming — it likely would have run here for a month and then sunk without a trace in a city that still seems woefully unable to propel its homegrown properties to national prominence and longevity — unless those artists involved ship out for the coasts and start all over. “To have a career,” says a still-wistful and slightly bitter Hollmann, “I had to leave Chicago.”
Brilliant combination
Sure, it’s true that Kotis and Hollmann changed the corporate-bashing plot from the fatal food of “After Taste” to a similarly nasty scheme to force people to pay to pee. Also, the score to “After Taste’ was credited to Patrick Snozich, not Hollmann. And there are differences between even a self-referential book musical and “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Goes Blind.” But any old fan of Cardiff Giant or the Neo-Futurists theater company was hit in the face when they saw “Urinetown” on Broadway. The show was a brilliant combination of two native Chicago aesthetic styles with two vital New York additions: money and clout. “We always did everything with complete seriousness,” says Bob Fisher, now a Los Angeles-based lawyer who was an influential company member at Cardiff Giant a decade ago. “And that meant we could be completely outrageous.”
Cardiff Giant, which was around from 1987 to 1993, had its roots in an improv class taught by Steve Schroer at the University of Chicago. After producing comedy reviews at the famous Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap after graduation, the mainly untrained group of former University of Chicago students (which included Kotis and Hollmann as writer-performers) took some classes at Second City and eventually decided to try their hand at full-length original shows.
They worked in tiny spaces all over town. “A Beggar’s Holiday,” a 1992 piece about corporate nasties who try to get a rich old man’s cash, was produced upstairs at the Ann Sather restaurant on Belmont Avenue. Other notable Cardiff Giant pieces included “LBJFKKK,” “Dreamy,” “Rancho Obscuro” and “All Eight Die.”
The Cardiff Giant modus operandi was lefty plots that attacked corporate greed, a darkly cynical approach to comedy and an intensely realistic style of acting. “There was always a serious end to everything we did,” Fisher says. “At least for the characters in the show.”
“All the Cardiff Giant shows,” Kotis says, “were very self-contained worlds with very extreme agendas. They all had life-and-death situations.”
But Cardiff Giant ultimately died as an arts group.
“Other emerging groups, like Lookingglass, were smart, organized and had access to funding,” Fisher says. “We didn’t get it. We moved `After Taste,’ our one big success, to the Raven Theatre and promptly lost all the money we had made. But that still felt like success to us. Eventually, people just couldn’t stay together.”
Working elsewhere
By the mid-1990s, Cardiff Giant was kaput and Hollmann had started playing piano for a Second City touring company. Kotis, meanwhile, began working with the Neo-Futurists, an Andersonville troupe with a very different aesthetic from Cardiff Giant.
In essence, the Neo-Futurists, founded by Greg Allen, were (and are) all about metatheater — that self-referential kind of drama that constantly breaks the fourth wall. Unlike Cardiff Giant, Neo-Futurist shows featured actors not characters, liked to undermine all the conventions of theater and kept telling the audience that they were, in fact, an audience. Kotis became a writer-performer there, working extensively with Allen and others.
By 1995, Kotis and his girlfriend (now wife), company member Ayun Halliday, had decided to try their luck creating a Neo-Futurist branch in New York. At the time, both of them appeared ambitious but interested mainly in replicating a Chicago institution in New York and keeping in close touch with their friends at home. Both said then that they might come back soon.
Shortly after moving, Kotis couldn’t decide if he wanted to marry Halliday. As it happened the Neo-Futurists had been invited to perform in Romania (a consequence of a Romanian company’s appearance at the old Chicago International Theater Festival) so, following the Romanian gig with his Chicago pals, Kotis took himself to Paris to brood over Halliday and life. He quickly decided marriage was the right thing to do, wanted to buy Halliday an engagement ring, but had run out of money. Thus he could not afford the city’s famously pricey pissoirs.
A musical idea
And so was born the idea for “Urinetown.”
“I decided I could either use the bathroom that was in front of me,” Kotis says, “or I could walk until 4 p.m. and relieve the pressure.”
By 1998, Kotis had gotten together again with Hollmann (who also had moved to New York after working in Chicago with the New Tuners group). The two fused the basic structure of “After Taste” with a new plot about people revolting after being forced to pay to go to the bathroom. Hollmann wrote a new score. They titled the show “Urinetown” and sent it back to Chicago to the Neo-Futurists and desperately tried to talk them into doing it.”
“It wasn’t up our alley, frankly,” recalls the Neo-Futurists’ Allen, who still runs the company (which, at the time, was preoccupied with trying to actually pay its members a wage). “They’d written this play and submitted it to us with a budget that was twice anything we had ever done. And there were aesthetic issues, because it wasn’t really a Neo-Futurist show. Actually it felt more like an Annoyance Theatre show to me.”
Chagrined by the rejection, Kotis and Hollmann immediately set about trying to turn “Urinetown” into what Allen would think was actually a Neo-Futurist kind of show. Kotis added lots of self-referential material, wherein the characters became actors commenting on this being a silly idea for a musical. He broke the fourth wall and had the narrator, Little Sally, directly address the audience. Hollmann followed suit with the music.
All of those changes stayed in the show — and were a big part of its eventual Broadway success. Still, the Neo-Futurists said no after the changes, and Hollmann and Kotis decided to produce it themselves in New York with the help of some New York friends and a few actors willing to work for no money.
“Either a show is a Neo-Futurist show or it’s not,” Allen says. “We didn’t think we should wrench something into our aesthetic in order to produce it.”
The rest of the show’s history is well known. The piece was pulled together at the New York Fringe Festival. Playwright David Auburn, a friend of the authors from their U. of C. days, brought the right powerful people to see the show there. It was given a bigger budget, a new director and was cast with musical-theater professionals. After snagging a decent review from New York Times critic Bruce Weber at its off-Broadway incarnation, “Urinetown” moved to the Great White Way, where it has enjoyed a run of more than 900 performances. Aside from the help of an old U. of C. friend, the piece had its entire trajectory toward success in New York, not Chicago.
Allen — who remains on close terms with Hollmann and Kotis — intensely resists any suggestion that the Neo-Futurists somehow missed out on a big chance with “Urinetown.”
“We have no regrets whatsoever,” Allen says. ” If we had done it, none of this ever would have happened. We would have produced it for a few weeks, and then it would have died like any other show. We wouldn’t have made any money off it. In fact, we would have lost money.”
Show’s calling card
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In Allen’s mind, much of the commercial success of “Urinetown” came from a producer being savvy enough to allow Chicago-style artists to work with a huge production budget on a show that clearly was wildly inappropriate for Broadway. It was that very inappropriateness that became the central clever conceit and the show’s calling card.
“The joy of the piece was taking something that is innately small and quirky and then doing it up in huge style,” Allen says. “In essence, the piece is not that different from a lot of other Chicago shows.”
Still, no regrets at all?
“Our theater is not about production values, it’s about low budget and high concept,” Allen says, his voice rising slightly in pitch. “We’re not sitting here trying to do shows to be produced on Broadway. We’re dedicated to what we want to express. We’re here to do the work. Money is not the deal. I’d hate to have the burden of Lookingglass, having to crank out shows that people pay 50 bucks to see.”
Push Allen further, though, and some frustrations come out. He thinks the Chicago media pays too little attention to the native theater, especially the new works that appear with such regularity in town. He’s come to realize that the site-specific nature of much of the Neo-Futurists’ work is financially limiting, even if it’s also the source of much of the troupe’s creative success.
“Our stuff cannot move because you can’t just grab a script and throw it at New York,” he says. “That doesn’t create the innate link to being here.”
Meanwhile, Hollmann and Kotis cared more about show business.
Big projects
They’ve been able to quit their day jobs. And their calls are getting returned. They’re working on new big projects — including an adaptation of the Alec Guinness movie “The Man in the White Suit.” They now are known New York quantities with careers in the mainstream musical theater.
“I could never get my shows produced in Chicago,” Hollmann says. “I didn’t have an agent. I wasn’t hip to submission proposals. I couldn’t get the Goodman interested in me. I wish there were producers in Chicago who’d recognize the homegrown talents.”
“I never want this to end,” says Kotis. “I spent plenty of time in Chicago not getting paid, and having to explain to friends and family that you do theater in Chicago because you are obsessed with it. I saw all my friends going off to become doctors. And it became harder and harder to have faith.”
While “Urinetown” stops by the Shubert Theatre, Kotis and Hollmann will visit the Neo-Futurarium Wednesday for a talk-back about the show (an event open to the public).
There also will be a Cardiff Giant reunion on Friday. And within a couple of weeks, both the show and its creators will be gone.
“My bar for success really was not that high,” Kotis says. “I just wanted to make a living in the American theater.”
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“Urinetown” plays Tuesday through Dec. 21 at the Shubert Theatre, 22 W. Monroe St.; $26-$75; 312-977-1700.