A satirical beat for a veteran cop

Jeff McCARTHY is biting the hand that once fed him. Or maybe billy-clubbing it.

As Inspector Javert in “Les Miserables” during its original 1988-89 run at the Shubert Theatre, McCarthy embodied dour determination.

Now he’s playing a very different cop -- the cynical but amusing Officer Lockstock in the tongue-in-cheek musical “Urinetown,” which just began its 12-day run at the Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills.

“Les Miz” is one of the more specific targets of the satire in “Urinetown.” The first act ends with an uprising that spoofs “Les Miz,” albeit not by name. Once again, McCarthy’s character is on the wrong side.

“They’re both into crowd control,” McCarthy says of his two police roles. “But Javert was misguided; Lockstock is not. After a nuclear bomb attack, like a cockroach, he’ll still be standing.”

McCarthy created the role of Lockstock in “Urinetown” for the show’s off-Broadway and Broadway runs in 2001, although not in its original 1999 incarnation at the New York International Fringe Festival.

He returned to it last week, on tour in Tempe, Ariz. He’ll stay in it for three more stops after Beverly Hills.

Lockstock is the omniscient narrator of “Urinetown,” the man who explains the show’s premise of a future society in which water shortages require citizens to urinate in privately operated facilities that charge for the privilege.

He’s also the bully who handles the renegades who resist the system.

And at the end, he’s the character who speaks the few lines that briefly lift the show out of its purely parodic realm and take it into the arena of more pointed commentary about environmental exploitation.

Those parting words drive his whole performance, McCarthy says. “My commitment to the play stays fresh because of the environmental issues on Lockstock’s mind.”

McCarthy didn’t think much of the show at first. And the title didn’t help. “I didn’t like the sound of it,” he says. “I didn’t much care for the script. I finally went in to audition and did a terrible job.”

Co-producer Matthew Rego remembers McCarthy’s tryout much differently. “We had seen him in ‘Side Show’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’ [as the Beast], so we knew he had a sharp, angular jaw and he could sing the heck out of the role. I didn’t know if he could do the comedy. But his audition was fantastic. A real ‘Aha!’ moment.”

McCarthy felt briefly reassured when he heard that veteran Broadway star John Cullum -- with whom he’d always wanted to work -- had signed on to play the villain. But Cullum’s presence wasn’t enough. “Two weeks into rehearsals, we were all moaning about the show,” McCarthy says. “We were meeting secretly to find out if there was some way we could get out of it.

“Then suddenly one day, we were doing a scene” -- it was “Snuff That Girl,” for those familiar with the score -- “and we started giggling. A window of understanding opened, and from then on, it was a blast.”

But it was still well after opening night that McCarthy came to his fuller appreciation of Lockstock and his “Urinetown” beat.

“I didn’t know what a great role it was until six months in, when I got sick and I got to watch the show from the audience, with the understudy in it.”

The off-Broadway run was at a 125-seat space next to a police station, where officers could be seen booking real-life vagrants who had been arrested for urinating in public, Rego says.

McCarthy believes the show was at its best in that intimate space. The audience “screamed their heads off,” he recalls.

The Broadway theater seated 630, and the tour houses are much bigger, including the 1,900-seat Wilshire. “It’s a little out of place,” McCarthy says. “But it’s a brand name now. Down the boulevard it goes.”

On tour, the cast doesn’t use the aisles as it did in New York, because the layout changes so much from theater to theater. “So it’s no longer as if we’re storming the house, disrupting people’s lives,” McCarthy laments. Nor is the interior of the theater painted black, as it was on Broadway.

McCarthy, 49, who lives in New York, was born in L.A. and later lived here for seven years, beginning with his run in “Les Miz.”

He grew up mostly in Santa Maria, three blocks from Allan Hancock College, home of Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts. When the school’s Marian Theatre was being built, he and his junior high friends would sneak into the construction site after hours and dangle by their knees from the lighting grid.

Thanks to an influential drama teacher, McCarthy began acting in high school (he played a constable, of course, in “The Music Man”) and then studied at the two-year conservatory.

Like many PCPA graduates, he went on to classes at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. But he continued to perform throughout most of the 1970s at PCPA’s additional summer stage in Solvang.

Despite his many starring musical roles, “I’ve never been the biggest fan of them,” McCarthy says, explaining why he doesn’t mind satirizing the form’s conventions in “Urinetown.”

“When a musical works, there is nothing like it. But so many of them are like children’s theater for adults.” He singles out the work of Stephen Sondheim and “Side Show” as great exceptions.

Still, he says, “someone upstairs handed me this Robert Goulet voice. I don’t listen to this kind of music. But it seems to be my fate to sing it.”

*

‘Urinetown’

Where: Wilshire Theatre, 8440 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills

When: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 1 p.m., plus 6:30 p.m. this Sunday

Ends: May 23 matinee

Price: $42-$67

Info: (213) 365-3500