Month: June 2006

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

We Recommend

thursday June 29

The Delta: Everything Southern

University of Memphis, Fogelman Executive Center, 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., $25 students, $50 nonstudents

A day-long seminar explores the history, culture, and music of the Mississippi Delta. Keynote speaker is James Cobb, University of Georgia professor and author of The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta. Call 678-4310 or visit the Web at

exlibris.memphis.edu/delta.

It’s Hot! Waterwise Gardening

Horticulture room at Agricenter International, noon

Bring a lunch and join environmentalist Susan Threlkeld for ideas on how to

conserve water while gardening during the summer months. Call 752-1207.

Carousel Memories: Echoes from the Heart

The Orpheum, 7 p.m., $6

More than 150 high school and college students from the Echoes of Truth arts program stage an original musical as tribute to the Libertyland carousel, the only ride not sold at last week’s auction. Student artwork of the carousel and other historic sites also will be sold before the show. Call 351-6460.

friday June 30

Finally Fridays

Gibson Guitar Factory, every Friday, 9 p.m.

DJs, food, and full bar turn a fabulous downtown view into an even better rooftop party. For more information, go to www.memphisfridays.com.

The Marshall Tucker Band

Sam’s Town Casino, 9 p.m., $10-$15

Check out the Southern rock band behind the hits “Heard It in a Love Song,” “Can’t You See,” and “Fire on the Mountain.”

Shirley Q. Liquor

Backstreet, 11 p.m.

Controversial performance featuring a white man in drag as a black woman with 19 children and a turquoise 1972 El Dorado Cadillac “Sammy Davis Jr.” edition.

saturday July 1

Eighth Annual Bluegrass Festival

Snow Lake Shores, MS (12 miles east of Holly Springs), 9 a.m.-9:30 p.m.

This bluegrass festival has a little something for everyone: music, barbecue, antiques, crafts, fireworks, boat parade, and free admission. Call 662-224-3913 or 662-224-8707 for more information.

Bobby Womack and Friends

Cannon Center for the Performing Arts, 8 p.m., $40-$50

“Looking for a Love” soul man Bobby Womack brings his legendary sound to Memphis. Call 525-1515 for tickets.

sunday July 2

Greece: Secrets of the Past

IMAX Theater, Pink Palace Museum, screenings every day

Actress Nia Vardalos (remember My Big Fat Greek Wedding?) narrates the latest addition to the IMAX library, Greece: Secrets of the Past. Digital recreations explore the original Parthenon and the volcanic eruption that buried Santorini in 1646 B.C. Rediscover the legacy left by the ancient Greeks, then explore what’s going on inside your own head at the Pink Palace’s current exhibit on the human brain. For show times: visit www.memphismuseums.org/show.htm.

tuesday July 4

Fishing Rodeo

Germantown Municipal Park Lake on Exeter Road, 9-10:30 a.m., $2

Youngsters ages 4 to 12 try to reel in a big one to benefit the Lions Club. Bring your own rod and tackle. Then, beginning at 5 p.m. there’s free rides, music, crafts, moon bounce, and a petting zoo. Fireworks go off at 9 p.m. Call 757-7375 for more information.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Balancing Act

Sometimes it’s hard to find the right balance … now try doing it on a unicycle. This weekend, the Memphis Unicycle Club will host the 35th annual North American Unicycling Championships and Convention (NAUCC). More than 300 unicyclers from across the United States and Canada will come to Memphis for races, workshops, creative competitions, and a public show. This is the first time NAUCC has been held in Memphis and only the second time it’s been in the South.

“I’m so excited to bring all my unicycle friends from afar and share with them the Memphis community,” says Tommy Thompson, president of the Memphis Unicycle Club (pictured). “It’s a little bit like hosting the Olympics!”

Events will center around St. George’s Independent School in Collierville, where there will be a free public show on Saturday, July 1st, from 2 to 7 p.m. The unicyclers will also ride in the Cordova Parade on July 4th.

But you can do more than just watch. Even complete beginners are welcome to participate in workshops and gym time to learn from experienced unicyclers. There will also be “fun-rides” downtown, at Shelby Forest, and in Overton Park, as well as offroading opportunities in both Shelby Farms and Bartlett’s Stanky Creek. The fee for noncompetitors is $40, and the Memphis Unicycle Club rents out unicycles for $10 per week.

Thompson says unicycling is a great tool for bringing together diverse people of all ages. He’s seen riders aged 5 to 93. It also has health benefits because it works the entire body. Ride on!

2006 North American Unicycling Championships and Convention, Friday-Wednesday, June 30th-July 5th, St. George’s Independent School in Collierville. For more information, go to memphisunicycleclub.com.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Record Reviews

Fishscale

Ghostface Killah

(Def Jam)

“Old Jeezy” reinvigorates the Wu and takes dope-game rap to the woodshed on a hip-hop epic.

Addressing a new generation of “pyrex scholars” over a horn fanfare, cock-rock guitars, and a disco-gorgeous groove, the Wu-Tang Clan’s greatest artist rhymes on “The Champ”: “Wondering, how did y’all niggas get past me?/I been doing this [since] before Nas dropped the ‘Nasty.'” The throwaway line functions as something of a shibboleth. If the hip-hop-history reference is too inside-baseball for you, then this album probably is as well. But if you’re an even slightly obsessive hip-hop fan, Fishscale can feel almost overwhelming.

Dennis “Ghostface Killah” Coles has a whiny, high-pitched flow that belies his imposing build and warmth and smarts that belie his moniker and crime-grime subject matter. He’s been a more consistent and durable record maker than any of the MC cohorts he debuted with on 1993’s classic posse album Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers. Utterly epic at 65 minutes, Fishscale is such a dense collection of crime stories, offbeat boasts, and exhortations (“Y’all be nice to the crackheads!”), soaring ’70s soul samples, random bursts of reality (our hero opens one song kicked back at the crib watching Larry King Live), and shock-and-awe beats that a hip-hop lover can get lost in it.

The album comes at you in movements. In the first third, Ghostface proves he can spin gripping, cinematic crime tales better than any new jack while never once trying to convince you he didn’t long ago rise above that world. The middle third is pure show-off: Luther Ingram-sampled endorsement of child abuse he remembers as good parenting, Willie Hutch-driven battle of the sexes, explosive Pete Rock-produced rave-up. The final third is where he plays “Old Jeezy,” bringing deep-soul wisdom and moral center to a newly resurgent subgenre (coke-trade rap) desperately in need of it, including an audacious self-produced sermon to big girls who really need to clean up and straighten out and a summoning of Notorious B.I.G. from the grave.

Thirteen years later and 10 years too late, here’s the best Wu-Tang album since the first. — Chris Herrington

Grade: A

The Hardest Way To Make an Easy Living

The Streets

(Vice/Atlantic)

Though English rapper/storyteller Mike “The Streets” Skinner is hip-hop only by association these days, no one outside of Jay-Z is more compelling simply talking over beats, and, on this third album, Skinner’s self-implicating musings on materialism are a match for Kanye West. The dizzying Brit slang, near-choral choruses, and sexual decency are commercial non-starters in the States, and he knows it: “Understated is how we prefer to be/That’s why I’ve sold three million and you’ve never heard of me.” After a scene-specific intro opus and a follow-up grime opera, album three is an abbreviated blast of self-contained songs. There’s a theme — an insider’s tour of the life of the nearly rich and not quite famous — but this time it snakes through rather than dominates. Skinner’s after-the-goldrush details are rich, funny, and self-aware, but he’s even better with a tear-jerking tribute to a deceased dad. (“Memento Mori,” “War of the Sexes,” “Never Went to Church”) — CH

Grade: A-

St. Elsewhere

Gnarls Barkley

(Atlantic)

When I first heard “Crazy,” Gnarls Barkley’s first single off St. Elsewhere, I was instantly smitten. The song features stringed orchestrations supported by a slaphappy bass line and vocals that lie somewhere between Al Green and Barry Gibb, creating a sound not heard since disco died. The song is pop dynamite. The rest of the album backs up the promise made by “Crazy,” primarily because the successful pop formula and sound of the single aren’t repeated. Gnarls Barkley voice box Cee-Lo (Goodie Mob) is able to croon, rap, and purr equally convincingly. Noted genre-smoosher Danger Mouse — who so memorably combined the Beatles and Jay-Z on his bootleg Grey Album — supplies the instrumental backbone. The result is a gooey mix of hip-hop, soul, R&B, gospel, electronica, dance, and pop. For building blocks, Danger Mouse samples Italian film scores, French library music, and obscure ’70s folk rock, engineering a sound that amazes and rarely misfires. (“Just a Thought,” “St. Elsewhere,” “Gone Daddy Gone”) — Greg Akers

Grade: A-

Categories
Book Features Books

Mommie Dearest

The cover of The Afterlife features the black-and-white photograph of a young woman in sharp profile — a woman who is clear-eyed and smiling: the very picture of health. It’s a photograph (from the mid-1950s?) of a woman named Louanne Antrim, and the placement of the image, running full across the top of the book’s jacket, is no accident: There she is, angelic, looking down on the title and the name of the author, Donald Antrim, Louanne’s only son.

The Afterlife, however, is no picture of health, and Louanne Antrim was no angel. It is a memoir that, in the space of a single page, describes her as “paranoid,” “abrasive,” and “frightening.” Her power to drive people away: “staggering”; her alcoholism: “operatically suicidal.”

Suicide wasn’t, however, the cause of her death. Lung cancer, in 2000, was. And in the weeks and months that followed, the author did what a loving, exasperated fortysomething son knew he had to do: He shopped for a new mattress. And he bought no ordinary mattress. Antrim got himself a Dux from Sweden, costing close to 7,000 bucks, but he had the right idea: “At last,” he remembers thinking, “I’m free of that woman! Now I’m going to buy a great bed and do some fucking and live my life.” But he had no idea: “What followed,” he also remembers, “was a workshop in hysteria.”

The bed was too springy, Antrim felt. The bed was too “reverberant,” he declared. “When you’re on the bed. When you’re in the bed. You feel too much. I feel too much,” he explained, not to his girlfriend (who’d heard enough) but to the perplexed president of Dux Interiors. So Antrim returned the bed.

No returning, though, the East Tennessee mother Antrim was born to. And no getting around Antrim’s shadowy, English-professor father, who married Louanne — twice. Or his Uncle Eldridge, who started life as a painter and ended life as another alcoholic (and borderline child molester; the object: the author). Or his mother’s boyfriend (after her second divorce, after she joined AA, after she went New Age), a man who thinks he possesses a landscape by Leonardo Da Vinci but a man well on his way to totally off his rocker.

A succession of horror stories? Clearly. But does that make The Afterlife payback time? Not so fast. Better to call it dedication time by an adult son coming to love-hate grips with a family that (shades of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day‘s Journey) “night after night, year after year, apologizes itself out of existence.”

That’s a memorable description by novelist turned memoirist Donald Antrim, and if you doubt any of Antrim’s dark details, consider The New Yorker, where portions of The Afterlife first appeared. The fact checkers at that magazine don’t stand for half-truths, and the editors don’t go for third-rate tell-alls.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Wave the Flag

Oh say can you see all the opportunities to celebrate the United States this Independence Day? All events listed below feature free admission, family-friendly live music, and food and beverage vendors.

On Saturday, July 1st, it’s the “Star-Spangled Celebration” at Shelby Farms. The show will feature live performances from Hoobastank, Breaking Point, and Survivor’s Jimi Jamison. Gates open at 3 p.m., and fireworks start at 9:50 p.m.

On Monday, July 3rd, the “Red, White, and Blue Celebration” will be held at Tom Lee Park on the banks of the Mississippi from 4 to 10 p.m., with fireworks at 9:45 p.m. There will be a motorcycle show, an antique car show, games, a barbecue-eating contest, and a hot-dog-eating contest. American Idol finalist Gideon McKinney will sing the national anthem.

Also on Monday is the “Fireworks Extravaganza” at Bartlett’s Bobby K. Flaherty Municipal Center, which will feature a performance of patriotic songs by the Bartlett Community Concert Band, as well as a show with Common Ground. Gates open at 6 p.m., and fireworks start at 9:30 p.m.

On Tuesday, July 4th, check out the Independence Day Parade at the Cordova Community Center. After a half-hour patriotic program starting at 9:30 a.m., there will be a parade of children and adults, complete with floats and costumes.

In Germantown, it’s the “Germantown Family Fourth Celebration” at Municipal Park. This annual community gathering will offer live music, games, rides, a petting zoo, and a fishing rodeo. Gates open at 5 p.m., and fireworks begin at 9:10 p.m.

See this week’s calendar for complete fourth of july listings.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Down in the Valley makes Taxi Driver a Western again.

The Los Angeles of David Jacobson’s imagination is a dusty, sun-dried place, the countryside almost bleeding through the pavement. In Down in the Valley, the writer/director sees modern-day L.A. as just a few generations removed from the Old West desert. The film’s setting regresses farther and farther into the wilds of the hills until, in the end, it has cloaked itself in the guise of the classic Hollywood Western.

The Western motif is established with the film’s main character, Harlan, played by Edward Norton, who speaks with a country-bumpkin drawl that is a generic mix of every sincere cowpoke in film history. Harlan is a South Dakota transplant to the San Fernando Valley and an experienced horseman and ranch hand struggling to find his way in a modern, complicated world. By chance he meets a young woman, Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood, in a likable version of her character from Thirteen), and he’s instantly bedeviled by her beauty, innocence, and sweetness.

As their relationship grows, Harlan’s true nature is slowly revealed to the audience, and his love for Tobe sours into obsession. The film itself has secret intentions as well: Down in the Valley is a kind of retrofitted Taxi Driver. But what Valley does best with the idea of Taxi Driver is unexpected (and just about the only thing that hasn’t been done to it already): explicitly return it to its Western roots.

Just as Taxi Driver updated the John Wayne classic The Searchers, telling a fundamentally similar story but transplanting the Western locales of Monument Valley to the dark cityscape of New York City in a summer swelter, Valley reverses the twist, making it a Western again.

The choice of Norton for the lead role is inspired. Simply put, he is his generation’s Robert De Niro. In roles as varied as Primal Fear, American History X, and Keeping the Faith, he brilliantly portrays a broken-boy murderer, an iron-hearted angel of death, and a broken-hearted man of the cloth. In Valley, he calls on all three characters, making Harlan into a charming romantic capable of some pretty unloving acts.

Norton’s Harlan is a criminal in the mold of De Niro’s Travis Bickle and a defender of innocence like Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, though his singularity of purpose is arguably more pure (love, not war) and certainly more politically correct than either. Harlan is a Bickle/Edwards variant that you’d just as soon buy a beer as punch in the mouth.

Valley doesn’t have the benefit of being iconic like The Searchers or unprecedented like Taxi Driver, but it works because it has a romantic and dreamlike, outlaw spirit unique to itself.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Can an American Idol wannabe swing a local election?

Ask Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton, who last weekend invited a flood of local dignitaries into his newly opened Whitehaven campaign headquarters (one of two HQs for Wharton – the other being located way off in East Memphis). But the true guest of honor, the piece de resistance at the mayor’s opening, was clearly Gedeon McKinney, the young Memphian who made the finals in this year’s American Idol competition –though crusty Brit judge Simon Cowell confessed to being made uneasy by McKinney’s preternaturally toothy smile. McKinney sang a couple of supportive numbers in his patented gospel-style manner, and who cares what Simon Cowell thinks about it all? He’s got no vote in Shelby County.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Biding Time

Monday’s meeting of the Shelby County Commission was not the swan song of the current body before a newly elected commission is seated after the August 3rd general election, but there was something ex post facto about this week’s meeting, all the same.

Outgoing 5th District commissioner Bruce Thompson could not resist pointing out an irony in his colleagues’ unanimous and routine decision to award a $13 million contract to a private firm to provide

health care to the inmates in the county’s corrections system. “I’m all for private management and out-sourcing,” Thompson commented wryly — a reminder of his long and futile campaign to win commission approval for just such an arrangement to manage the county incarceration units.

Similarly, the appearance before the commission of Memphis schools superintendent Carol Johnson and members of her board to plead for additional funding had a pro forma air about it. Johnson later acknowledged to the media that she had mainly meant to “remind” the commission of its responsibilities to the schools. Meanwhile, a somewhat desultory debate had given commission members a chance to rehearse some of their familiar chorus lines. Republican John Willingham, a candidate for county mayor, allowed himself one more bromide on county government’s failure “to straighten out [its] finances and numbers,” while Democrat Walter Bailey indulged himself in one more lamentation that the city schools were the victims of “trickle-down” financing.

For all that, the county’s previously agreed-upon tax rate, which determined the rate of school funding, was whisked through with only perfunctory nay votes from Bailey and Michael Hooks.

Bailey mounted one more last stand when he waged what turned out to be a solitary campaign to prevent, or at least defer, a resolution to reauthorize the commission needs-assessment committee which, for the last year, has made an effort to predetermine the ideal spending ratios for the city and county schools. “A grave disservice to both boards — a shotgun approach,” he pronounced. But to no avail; the resolution went through handily.

Monday’s meeting also saw the wrapping up, more or less, of the various remaining protests against the use of the newly purchased Diebold voting machines. As Election Commission director James Johnson explained, state law, which forbids any ballot changes within 40 days of an election, rendered it too late to do anything about the potentially confusing number and arrangement of the various screens. And complaints about the accuracy of the machines themselves from Minister Yahweh (the community activist once known as Sweet Willie Wine) had been formally “received” and duly shelved as recently as the committee meetings held last week by the commission.

So it was that a variety of issues and problems belonging to the current commission’s tenure were passed along for probable reconsideration by the next one. And so it goes, as ever, at election time.

Categories
Music Music Features

Rockets Return

When St. Louis’ longtime alt-country stalwarts The Bottle Rockets play Young Avenue Deli this week, it’ll be a return engagement of sorts: The band recorded its current album, Zoysia, at Ardent Studios last November with local producer Jeff Powell.

For Powell it was a collaboration a long time in the making.

“I first saw them at Barristers about 10 years ago,” Powell says. “We had a mutual friend, and she told me, ‘You better get your butt down here and see them.’ And ever since that night, I’ve really wanted to make a record with them.”

In the interim, Powell and the band have come to share a management company — Undertow Management — which helped bring the two together. And on a tour last year, the band stopped in Memphis and visited Ardent with Powell. Later he took them to eat at Central Bar-B-Q and sealed the deal.

Recorded in about 10 days, Zoysia is probably the band’s best album since mid-’90s highlights The Brooklyn Side and 24 Hours a Day.

“I’d always heard their sound as a little tougher than what I heard on the record,” Powell says. “When we got into the studio, [lead singer] Brian [Henneman] had a copy of Tonight’s the Night by Neil Young, and when we started the session, he held it up and said, ‘Whenever we get to a place where we’re stumbling and not sure what to do, just think: What would these guys do?'”

Powell’s wife, singer Susan Marshall, guests on the album and will likely reprise her role on stage.

Local performer Ron Franklin will be opening for the Bottle Rockets with a new lineup for his rotating band Ron Franklin Entertainers: former Reigning Sound rhythm section Greg Roberson (drums) and Jeremy Scott (bass) along with Tearjerkers keyboardist Adam Woodard.

“The Entertainers started with me and [drummer] Ross [Johnson], and whether or not Ross was in it at the moment, the Entertainers always had some kind of link to the way Ross and I would play together, with a lot of hill-country and Bo Diddley rhythms.”

But the new lineup — which was born out of aborted rehearsals to back up Love singer Arthur Lee on a potential tour — is something Franklin sees as a more settled band, with plans to go into Royal Studio to work on a possible album. Franklin also has a solo album — Blue Shadows Falling — in the works.

The Bottle Rockets and the Ron Franklin Entertainers play Young Avenue Deli Friday, June 30th. The doors open at 9 p.m. with a cover of $10.

Hi-Tone Headlock

Midtown rock club the Hi-Tone Café takes a break from music this week to indulge a different Memphis cultural legacy: wrestling.

Cable access show Deep South Wrestling will screen episodes from its upcoming season at the club Monday, July 3rd.

According to promoter Chris Walker — a relative latecomer to the DSW (no, not Designer Shoe Warehouse) crew — it started in 1996 as a drunken pastime among a group of hardcore wrestling fans, with the actual wrestling taking place in a spare bedroom with a mattress as a ring. Ten years later, home movies taken for private amusement have morphed into a weekly program that both spoofs and pays homage to the glory days of professional grappling — replete with colorful characters and ongoing storylines.

“That’s the only thing we have, since we can’t wrestle,” Walker says of the ripped-from-the-vaults-of-classic-Memphis-wrestling storylines. “It’s really just a forum to show us talking crap and wearing crazy costumes. We don’t have a ring and nobody’s in shape, so all we have is storylines and crazy characters.”

Featuring characters such as rock-and-roll “babyface” Chip Thunders, hated “heel” Diamond Dulius, and onetime “jobber” turned fan favorite The Memphis Creep, Deep South Wrestling airs Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. on Time Warner Cable’s channel 17. Season five debuts July 13th, but you can get a sneak preview at the Hi-Tone Monday, July 3rd, where DSW characters will be on hand to introduce each episode. The screenings start at 8 p.m. and admission is free. For more info, seeMySpace.com/DeepSouthWrestling.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Gee Whizz

“Urine” isn’t a dirty word. It’s more clinical than “pee” but less serious than “micturition.” It isn’t whimsical like “tinkle,” and it’s not as common as “whizz” or as brutish as “piss.” But Memphis is the obstinate buckle of the Bible Belt, and that buckle comes undone for nothing and nobody. This is God’s country.

Playhouse on the Square’s executive producer Jackie Nichols says some Memphians have gotten their panties in a wad over his theater’s use of the U-word. Angry calls have been registered, and posters for Urinetown: the Musical were removed from public places. What’s especially remarkable about all of this is that Urinetown, for all its potty talk, is positively sanitary. It’s virtually free of profanity and about as fun-packed and wholesome as a play about vast public corruption and the annihilation of an impoverished, plague-stricken city can be.

Bill Andrews plays Urinetown‘s narrator, Officer Lockstock. With gravity and good humor, he addresses the audience directly, explaining that his city is suffering a drought and that private urination has been outlawed. If people want to pee, they have to pay, and those who don’t play by the rules are arrested and shipped off to a place called Urinetown. Lockstock, aided by Little Sally (played with grubby, waifish spunk by Megan Bowers), also lays down the dramatic rules governing musicals. “Too much exposition” can kill a musical, Andrews says. Bowers squeaks that a “bad name” could be equally devastating.

All of Urinetown‘s politicians are in the pocket of the Urine Good Company, headed by the deliciously evil CEO Caldwell B. Cladwell, played to the nines by Playhouse vet Ken Zimmerman. Zimmerman waddles and squawks his way through Urinetown, spinning dark treachery into delightful foolishness along the way.

Jordan Nichols, Jackie’s talented progeny, returns from New York to sing and dance his way through the demanding role of Urinetown‘s Bobby Strong. After Cladwell’s daughter Hope teaches Bobby to listen to his heart, the young man causes an uprising at Public Amenity #9, kidnaps the girl, and becomes the spiritual leader of the huddled, unwashed masses who yearn to pee freely. Rachael Saltzman brings an endearingly dizzy quality to Hope and doesn’t lose her comic edge as she transforms from conflicted hostage to righteous revolutionary.

Costumed like that icon of American propaganda Rosie the Riveter, Carla McDonald lends her powerful voice and considerable comic gifts to the role of Penny Pennywise, a latter-day Mother Courage who makes virtue of necessity.

Urinetown‘s author, Greg Kotis, cut his teeth with Chicago’s Neo-Futurists, the clever collective behind the long-running surrealist hit Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Like Too Much Light, Urinetown aims to be uncompromisingly artistic without sacrificing its commercial edge. Its tone and structure have been lifted directly from the groundbreaking Brecht/Weill musical The Threepenny Opera, but it’s tempered by the kind of sophomoric, fart-laden musical parodies we’ve come to expect from Mel Brooks.

With a light touch and laser accuracy, director Bob Hetherington eviscerates all the ridiculous tropes of musical theater and even manages to take an unforgettable poke at Thornton Wilder’s classic play Our Town.

Urinetown‘s finest attribute is its ability to stimulate the mind as well as the funny bone. Just when you think you know the heroes from the villains, the ground shifts to make you reconsider everything. Just as Threepenny Opera closes with near tragedy that’s supplanted by a fake happy ending, Urinetown‘s fake happy ending evolves into genuine tragedy. It’s a sad, sad story told by a brilliant comic and enthusiastically interpreted by an impressive troupe of actors, singers, and dancers.

So don’t take down the posters. Please.

Urinetown: the Musical

Playhouse on the Square

Through July 23rd