More than 25 years have passed since a young University of Chicago graduate named Greg Kotis, having encountered pay-to-pee toilets while traveling in France, hit upon a whacky idea for a musical: What if some nefarious corporate entity managed to ban in-home facilities in a drought-stricken city an d figured out how to control the populace by owning their need to answer nature’s call? He had quite the title in mind: “Urinetown.” Kotis was at the time a member of the Chicago theater company called The Neo-Futurists, a highly innovative troupe that explored self-aware theater (meaning shows that knew they were shows) long before the practice became more mainstream. He collaborated with his composer friend Mark Hollmann, a fellow Chicagoan who he had met while working at Chicago’s famously innovative Cardiff Giant Theater Company (which was around from 1987-1993) and the two of them conceived the show as (in part) a parody of other musicals, including of “Les Miserables” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” as well as the musicals of the fervent years, like “The Threepenny Opera” and “The Cradle Will Rock.” One of the great legends of the Chicago theater is that the Neo-Futurists declined to do the show (“Chicago could have been ‘Urine”s kind of town,” I lamented in a 2003 post-mortem) and thus Kotis took it to the New York International Fringe Festival where it hit big, eventually landing on Broadway in September 2001, which was not the best time to open an edgy new musical. Therein, a character called Little Sally, who knows she is in a show, actually says to the show’s narrator, Officer Lockstock, “I don’t think too many people are going to come see this musical.” Given what happened to Broadway in the aftermath of Sept. 11, she proved to be prescient. And not just because of the title. All of this history was in my mind at Theo Ubique Theatre this past weekend, where “Urinetown” is getting its first local staging in many years; it’s done here as a kind of environmental cabaret with the show happening all over Theo’s small space on the Evanston side of Howard Street, arranged with tables in the center and actors hoping to pee all over the place. So to speak. Chicago had brief run of the national tour and I recall a Mercury Theater production around 2006. But although Kotis and Hollman did collaborate on a very funny subsequent show “Yeast Nation,” at Chicago’s now defunct American Theater Company, I hadn’t seen “Urinetown” in more than 15 years before director Danny Kapinos’ production last weekend, replete with lively choreography from Brenda Didier. So your critic mostly was glad to see this smart material again with the same kind of young and enthusiastic cast that worked on it 25 years ago, including a most amusing Little Sally in Maya Tanaka Allwardt; the material was ahead of its time and it still holds up well. Back in 2006, that aforementioned first Chicago production, along with another in Ohio, was sued by the Broadway team, which claimed that they’d copied New York director John Rando’s copyrighted staging, although the theaters understandably argued that it was hard to know where the staging began and the demands of the material ended. I think that likely put a bit of a chill on future productions and it perhaps explained why some of the parodies that I recalled so fondly did not seem to land this time around. Luke Nowakowski (right) and the cast of "Urinetown" by Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre. (Liz Stenholt) In general, this new production struck me overall as a tad too earnest and overplayed, and thus insufficiently dry and sardonic, to really match the original intent (although the excellent Allwardt has the style down). But cast members like Amanda Rodriguez, who plays the faux ingenue Hope Cladwell, and Luke Nowakowski, who plays leading man Bobby Strong, certainly do full justice to Hollmann’s score and the whole company throws itself into the creation of a very fun show, happily returned to what should have been its original home. (Always kinda was, anyway). Chris Jones is a Tribune critic. [email protected] Review: “Urinetown” (3 stars) When: through Jan. 4 Where: Theo Ubique Theatre, 721 Howard St., Evanston Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes Tickets: $50-$66 at 773-939-4101 and theo-u.com ...read more read less