By Robert Avila

WE PASSED THE Fourth of July on a sunny picnic-checkered patch of Dolores Park, where – after a short but irreverent service led by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence – the San Francisco Mime Troupe unfurled its new show, Veronique of the Mounties, flaying empire and militarism with dependably high spirits. Next, came a peek at some modern-day pamphleteers in the impressive "Art Propaganda War" exhibit at the Lab on 16th Street. Asserting independence from present tyranny, rather than saluting yesterday's imperfect job, turned out to be not only more practical but also more fun. And anyway, it felt a little unsporting to celebrate emancipation from Great Britain at a time when, under Toady Blair, it's really their turn to declare independence from us.

The antiwar holiday capped a week that began, appropriately, with American Conservatory Theater's presentation of Urinetown: The Musical, Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis's subversive fringe-fest-to-off-Broadway-to-Broadway production, which has reaped vast praise despite its unlikely premise. Set in a "Gotham-like city" in the aftermath of "the Stink Years" (vernacular for a worldwide ecological disaster that delivered the last few wells of fresh water into the hands of a mighty corporation), Urinetown imagines a world where, for the majority of people, micturition takes place in public pay-per-pee facilities. In this totalitarian digestive system, weak, cash-strapped bladders and other troublemakers find themselves disappeared to a mysterious penal colony called Urinetown, a place so remote and hopeless it might as well be Uranus. A not entirely unfamiliar world, in short, where government of, by, and for the corporation has turned society into a two-caste system so increasingly repressive it's bound to burst. Being a musical, it need just add a charismatic young idealist (Charlie Pollock), a single corporate scoundrel at the top (Ron Holgate), his lovely daughter (Christiane Noll), a discontented rabble, two cops, a lawyer, a jilted dame, a nosy street urchin, and a venal senator (Dennis Kelly), and voilà! – revolution.

Worth the hype, Urinetown is devastatingly clever musical theater, spoofing conventions while paying inspired homage to the form, with everyone from Bertolt Brecht to Bob Fosse passing through its depression-era tableaux. John Rondo directs with verve and a wry intelligence a powerhouse cast, headed up by Tom Hewitt's brilliant narrator, Officer Lockstock (sort of a cross between Robert Stack and Tim Curry). Taking heat from local ragamuffin Little Sally (Meghan Strange), Lockstock concedes the story line, especially given its macabre ending, doesn't add up to much of a musical in the traditional sense. Yet this Brechtian distancing effect frames an eclectic assortment of witty and tuneful songs, contagious dance numbers, and smart, ferocious comedy that ultimately delivers even a little more than that. In the absurdity of the plot lie far-from-irrational fears and a stinging question: what could be more absurd than the reality we have come to accept? As Officer Lockstock says, speaking of facts as much as formulas, "In the end, it's nothing you don't know."

Make sense not war

A recurring joke in Urinetown works by confusing the human heart as symbol of romantic love with the messy knot of tissue forming the actual organ. A canny device for upsetting the romantic pretensions of the musical formula – a ray of reality through the fog of fantasy – it's an apt metaphor for George Bernard Shaw's project in Arms and the Man, his antiromantic romantic comedy, enjoying a lively and infectious production at the California Shakespeare Theater.

Lillian Groag's spirited direction falters only slightly in mocking too well the romantic habits of her characters, since it leaves less for the antihero, Captain Bluntschli (Anthony Fusco), to deflate. Nevertheless, with the arrival of Fusco's first-rate Chaplinesque Bluntschli, the pace gets rolling and doesn't slacken for a minute, steadily building to a comic-romantic crescendo that makes fine use of Groag's excellent cast.

Set during the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885 in the home of a wealthy Bulgarian family, the play tells the story of Raina (Stacey Ross), daughter to Catherine (Domenique Lozano) and Major Petkoff (Brian Keith Russell), who finds a routed enemy soldier hiding in her bedroom. The charming Captain Bluntschli, a Swiss mercenary fighting rather arbitrarily on the Serbian side, proceeds to turn all of the young woman's (and our) romantic notions of war, heroism, and love upside down with his practical experience and common-sense appraisals as a professional soldier and a "free citizen" of Switzerland.

Meanwhile Raina's fiancé, Sergius (a wonderfully droll Dan Hiatt), all dashing profile in spotless military attire, finds himself confounded by the working out of ordinary problems unaccounted for in his naive worldview. "Everything I think is mocked by everything I do!" he cries.