The worst title in town: Urinetown may be a bad name for a play, but it's also not one you can ignore
National Post
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
AL1 / FRONT
Arts & Life
J. Kelly Nestruck
While Juliet initially believed that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," she soon came to realize that her lover's family name did make a difference -- the difference between "happily ever after" and "O happy dagger." It's the same in theatre: A great title can turn a lacklustre show into a hit and a bad one can bayonet the box-office receipts of even the best-written show. Would, for instance, the ill-fated young Capulet's words have become immortal if Shakespeare had put her in a play called The Two Lovers of Verona instead of Romeo and Juliet?
Urinetown: The Musical, which opens in Toronto at CanStage tomorrow, is perhaps the most unlikely titled Broadway hit of all time. The critics have been unanimous: It has "the worst title to ever grace a musical."
A satire about a drought-afflicted future in which a malevolent corporation has privatized all the toilets in town, Urinetown first packed them in at the New York Fringe Festival, where the mere mention of bodily fluids is enough to generate lineups. It was the musical's subsequent success off-Broadway and then on, that was more surprising.
Wherever Urinetown goes, there are stage whispers that its scatological title will kill it. Toronto has been no exception. For the past few weeks, the scuttlebutt has been that puritanical Canadians have been scared off by the prurient title.
But Marty Bragg, CanStage's artistic producer, is quick to flush the rumours of slow advance sales. "Not at all," he says emphatically. "We're tracking exactly the way [the show] tracked in New York and San Francisco."
Still, it's no secret that Urinetown's title has made some people nervous. "It does affect people's perception of the show," Bragg admits. In Toronto, CanStage decided the best marketing offence was a good defence, so it launched a self-deprecatory advertising campaign with posters that say The Best Show in Town. (With the Worst Title.)
CanStage has dealt with worse titles, however, Bragg notes. There was, for instance, Rat Bag, a play by Martha Ross and John Millard that ran as part of the theatre's 1992 season. "It was a fabulous show, but a bit of an unfortunate title," he says ruefully.
If there is a key to pulling in audiences, Bragg says, it is to give your shows short, recognizable sobriquets. "One of the plays that we're producing next year, Unless, which is based on Carol Shields' book, will have tremendous recognition because so many people know Carol and so many people have read that book," he says, predicting that the one-word adaptation will be a hit.
The exception that proves Bragg's rule is Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love by Brad Fraser, one of Canada's most successful plays ever, despite its gangling title. "It's a real mouthful, so usually people just cut it down to Human Remains," says Jim Millan, who directed the show's first Toronto production. In Japan, they shortened the title to a single syllable: Sex.
Unidentified Human Remains ... is not the only production with a memorable marquee with which Millan, artistic director of Crow's Theatre, has been involved. In 1999, he directed the Canadian premiere of Shopping and Fucking by British bad-boy playwright Mark Ravenhill.
Part of the aptly named in-yer-face theatre movement, Shopping and Fucking has had problems buying advertising in newspapers -- not to mention on television and radio -- wherever it gets put on. "The Canadian production is the one that got away with the least asterisks of any production ever," notes Millan. (Here the ads were for Shopping and F*cking, whereas almost everywhere else in the world, they were for Shopping and F***ing.)
Ravenhill's show even made Canadian broadcast history: When Toronto radio host Andy Barrie discussed the play on air, it was the first time the F-word or any of its derivatives was used on a CBC morning show. "It got to the point where people were doing articles about the number of articles devoted to the topic of the title of the play," Millan recalls.
Jerry Wasserman, a Vancouver theatre critic and professor of drama at UBC, agrees that a headline-grabbing title can literally make a show. "Shopping and Fucking is an incredibly mediocre play, I think, and yet it got a huge amount of attention because of the title," he says. "There are many better contemporary British in-yer-face plays than that one, but none of them has made the circuit in the way that that play did."
Plays have minuscule marketing budgets compared to movies and get less media coverage, so sometimes the title is all prospective audience members have to go on. "It's easy to know what a movie is about before you go and see it," Wasserman notes. "I mean, Troy isn't a particularly exciting title, but it doesn't need to be."
Wasserman's favourite Canadian theatre title is Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Tomson Highway's play about a group of men living on the fictional Wasaychigan Hill Indian Reserve. "No one has ever come up with a reasonable explanation for the title. I don't know if it actually sells any tickets or any copies of the play, butit certainly imprints itself in your brain, like any good marketing tool."
Popular Canadian plays often have famous names in their title, Wasserman says, noting Maggie and Pierre by Linda Griffiths and Billy Bishop Goes to War by John Grey with Eric Peterson. "Both of those plays came out of ... the intense Canadian nationalism of the '70s, when a lot of Canadian theatre was about rediscovering lost Canadian heroes and celebrities and putting them back on stage."
One of Canadian theatre's greatest titlists is George F. Walker, whose early plays -- Beyond Mozambique, Ramona and the White Slaves and Zastrozzi -- were given exotic titles to match their far-flung locales. His later titles have less zing. Says Wasserman: "His recent plays that are set in a city that looks very much like Toronto pretty much have these banal Torontoesque titles. Love and Anger, Suburban Motel, things like that."
Other favourite Canadian play titles of Wasserman's include The Ecstacy of Rita Joe by George Ryga, Judith Thompson's Lion in the Streets and Ronnie Burkett's play Street of Blood -- the last of which is memorable only once you realize it's a puppet show.
The most important thing is to make sure a title gets noticed, says Wasserman. "Urinetown is not a show that you would ignore; if it were called Downtown, it probably wouldn't make you look twice."
So as much as Urinetown may be the worst title in town, it might also be the best because people are talking about it, even if only in hushed tones.
Millan agrees. "It's the Canadian play titles that are interchangeable with every other Canadian play -- that to me is a much worse fate."
posted by J. Kelly 3:06 PM