Sunday, November 23, 2003

By Christopher Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Yes, Christiane Noll admits, "the title does put people off."

That's because the show is the Broadway hit with the improbable double-entendre title, "Urinetown." "Will it tour?" asked the 2002 Post-Gazette review, answering, "Yes, but dragging that title like a millstone."

	"Urinetown" Where: PNC Broadway in Pittsburgh at Benedum Center, Downtown. When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday; 8 p.m. Friday; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 1 and 6:30 p.m. next Sunday. Tickets: $20 to $60.50 at Theater Square box office; 412-456-6666 or www.pgharts.org.

Pittsburgh gets to judge for itself when "Urinetown" arrives Tuesday for a week at the Benedum, with Noll playing Hope, the optimistic young rich girl at the center of the plot, whom Noll describes as "the ingenue on Ritalin."

She points out that the show itself deals with its unusual title in the first few minutes by making fun of it. And once the audience is in its seats, Noll says, "it's a laugh riot and a party. Some come in expecting to be offended in some way, but when they realize they aren't, they're kicking themselves, thinking, 'I could have been enjoying myself all night.'"

What Pittsburgh will discover is what the show calls "the story of two kids who fall in love in a city in the middle of a water shortage." It's a comic satire of corporate greed, sort of a cross between the proletarian sympathies of "The Threepenny Opera" and the giddy parody of "Little Mary Sunshine" or "The Carol Burnett Show."

The story is of a mythical town where control over scarce water has been privatized, handed over by corrupt politicians to UGC (Urine Good Company -- hear the pun?), an all-powerful corporation which gives "spend a penny" new meaning. The oppressed revolt. The mode is so camp that not even the worst apologist for corporate freebooting could be offended.

Some of the humor depends on parody of other musicals. But Noll says the theater references "shouldn't be a problem for Pittsburgh, which has a lot of theater."

Noll knows that firsthand, since she graduated from the music program at Carnegie Mellon in 1990. While here, she did two summers in the Pittsburgh CLO ensemble, earning her Actors Equity card. One actor she worked with then was Ron Holgate, with whom she's reunited in "Urinetown," where he plays her father, the villain.

Another cast member familiar to Pittsburgh is Beth McVey, a native of Huntington, W.Va., who earned her Equity card at the CLO in 1977 and has done three CLO shows since. Other cast members with Pittsburgh ties are Katie Adams, a native of Irwin; Jamie LaVerdiere, from Du Bois; and Richard White, from Bethel Park.

Noll was born in New York City and grew up in Bergen County, N.J. She came to CMU because "I was going to be a computer science major!" But she noticed that CMU also had drama and music and thought, "Oh, maybe I'll double-major."

She laughs at the memory -- no one pulls off that sort of double major at CMU without being two people. But she did end up in the music school, having wowed Lee Cass with her audition and having been assured they were starting a joint program with drama. That program is still under discussion 15 years later, but Noll did manage to take some courses in drama. "I kind of wrote my own curriculum."

Noll's singing voice is certainly her strong suit. "The challenge in my career is getting people to be distracted away from my voice to realize that I do a lot of other things."

After graduation, she was in a regional "South Pacific" directed by Rob Marshall -- a credit to cherish -- and also did "Oliver!" at the Carousel Theater in Akron, Ohio -- "my first principal job, and I didn't go back to chorus after that."

National tours have included "City of Angels," "Miss Saigon" and "Grease" ("as a kick"). But her biggest break was playing Emma in "Jekyll and Hyde," on which she took the full ride to Broadway, spending nearly two years with the show.

"That pretty much blossomed my career," she says. She got to do the cast album, has done several solo CDs -- including "Christiane Noll: A Broadway Love Story" -- along with several more cast recordings and "a lot of regional work on new pieces. I'm happy to be in on the birthing." The most recent is "Kept," a new Henry Krieger-Bill Russell musical, which Noll describes as "basically Camille set in Studio 54."

Although she's been working mainly in theater, recently her "bread and butter between theater jobs has been symphony singing," appearing with more than 40 symphonies. She has appeared with the Pittsburgh Symphony Pops, most recently two years ago, when her solos ran from "Till There Was You" ("The Music Man") to "All I Ask of You" ("Phantom of the Opera") to "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" ("Evita").

Preparing "Urinetown" for tour was unusual. Rather than replicating his Tony Award-winning direction, John Rando and the creative team led by Greg Kotis (book, lyrics) and Mark Hollman (music, lyrics) took the cast with them through the creative process. Rando invited them to see the Broadway production and told them, according to Noll, "We love the New York cast, and if you want to steal something, fine; they're great to steal from. But whatever you take has to become yours. Imitation lasts just three days."

So, as Noll describes it, the entire show was "given birth a second time, with the knowledge gained from the previous times."

The previous times were three. The idea for the show came to Kotis, backpacking through Europe, distressed at the pay toilets in Paris. He and Hollman wrote "Urinetown" just "goofing around," Noll says, as a "what if 'The Simpsons' did a musical?"

It was turned down by everyone they showed it to until a tiny production at a 1999 New York fringe festival. A hit there, it was restaged professionally off-Broadway, then moved to Broadway's 500-seat Henry Miller Theatre in the fall of 2001.

Restaging it for touring meant learning to play much bigger houses. The 2,800-seat Benedum is big, but Noll was talking from St. Louis, where the cast was playing the 5,000-seat Fox Theatre. In New York, the cast runs through the audience. You can't do that on the road, where the audience may start 50 feet away. "And it takes time for sound to get up to the back of the hall and for them to respond and their sound to come back down to us."

Their director, however, told them: "Do not play to the house. Play the show. Don't make it larger." And their stage manager chides them, that, "yes, laughter is provocative. That's all good. But let's remember what the story is about."

In other words don't shtick it up -- it's a silly enough show already. Title aside, it's a nice fit with a holiday week.

For more on Noll, see www.ChristianeNoll.com.

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