Potty play Urinetown flows freely at the Lyric BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Prices at the pump are hitting new highs each day, and the business pages are full of bulletins about the rising cost of indispensables for oil-dependent industries. Welcome to the outlandish premise of the Tony-winning Urinetown: The Musical! And at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, the chamber (pot) musical unfurls (through October 15) with sure-handedness and an exuberance that at times proves too vibrant to be contained on stage.

The impoverished folks of a drought-ridden city have had their private toilet privileges eliminated, and the public loos are managed by a shady corporation in cahoots with the government. Transgressors against the pay-to-pee policy are "sent to Urinetown," never to return. But when idealistic rabble rouser Bobby Strong (Rob Morrison, a recent Emerson grad with a fresh-from-the-farm look, in an unpolished but promising professional debut) leads a pee-for-free revolution, the oppressed populace unites. And since Bobby and tyrannical corporate boss Caldwell B. Cladwell’s daughter, Hope (played with a good mix of innocent uncertainty and exuberance by Jennifer Ellis), have become improbable lovers, the proletariat has added leverage.

The show is a one-note potty joke raised to epic heights and laced with blatant symbolism. The joke gets tired, but the book and score by Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann pay tribute to and parody Bertolt Brecht’s theater of provocation, nodding to the past as a means of plunging forward. You can view the show as both a populist satire that would make Mark Twain proud (or jealous) and an inside joke for theater buffs. The score, played by a tucked-away quintet under the direction of Jonathan Goldberg, alludes to everything from the Hassidic dances of Fiddler on the Roof to the Fleet Street doom of Sweeney Todd to Bob Fosse’s razz-ma-tazz.

Under Spiro Veloudos’s nimble direction and abetted by Ilyse Robbins’s well-informed if at times affected choreography, the dynamic proceedings unfold in the less-than-sprawling Lyric space with the fluidity of water gushing down a drain. The show feels more effective in the intimate Lyric than it did at the Colonial, where the touring production stopped last year, not least because the stepped seats keep the players from speaking down to us from on high, which wouldn’t suit the play’s self-referential, self-depreciating style. The actors mostly pull it off with relish, notably Christopher Chew as Officer Lockstock, the cop and narrator/MC, and Sean McGuirk as Cladwell, who mocks the slick, greedy villain stereotype without resorting to caricature. Only Veronica J. Kuehn, as voice-of-the-people street urchin Little Sally, is miscast: her childish mannerisms are cloying, and her singing, though verging deliciously on the deranged, comes off as precious.

Urinetown, which debuted at the New York International Fringe Festival in 1999, has enjoyed a stage life marked by uncanny timing. After a successful Off Broadway run, the show moved to Broadway in September of 2001. Its opening night, however, was pre-empted by the September 11 attacks, and that context gave the show’s victimization of innocents a poignant edge. Given the recent natural disasters and our oil problems, the Lyric’s selection of a season opener seems prescient. When Cladwell snarls, "Worldwide ecological devastation has a way of changing a man," it’s hard not to reflect on the wasteful ways of modern life.