Ray of Light Theatre's 25th-anniversary season runs a drought-satire musical, "Urinetown," through Aug. 29 at the Barbary Stage, its home at 215 Jackson Street in the old Barbary Coast.

At 215 Jackson Street, on the flatland edge of Jackson Square where the brick warehouses that survived 1906 now hold design showrooms and law offices, a small musical-theater company is selling tickets to a world where you have to pay to relieve yourself. The show is "Urinetown," and it runs at the Barbary Stage — the name a nod to the Barbary Coast, the vice district that once spread out from these blocks — through Aug. 29.

The company is Ray of Light Theatre, which bills itself as San Francisco's home of "award-winning musicals with a bite" and is marking 25 years with this season. "Urinetown: The Musical," with music and lyrics by Mark Hollmann and book and lyrics by Greg Kotis, opened here July 31. It is a 2001 satire that won three Tony Awards and has aged into something the company's own marketing calls, without much argument, "pretty timely": a drought so severe that private toilets are outlawed, public ones are metered by a corporation called the Urine Good Company, and a rebellion starts when one man — Bobby Strong, played here by Sadat Hossain — decides he's had enough. Isaiah Tyrelle Boyd directs and choreographs; Ben Prince is musical director.

The tagline the company is running is "the revolution will not be sanitized." SFGATE, reprinting a Bay City News item this week, reported that reviewers have called the production "flawlessly executed" and "razor sharp," though it did not name them; the marquee blurbs on Ray of Light's own site — "rousing and infectious," from Variety — are pull-quotes for the show writ large, not this staging.

What's worth noting from the neighborhoods desk is less the pee jokes than the address. A 25-year-old company holding down a fixed stage on a specific downtown corner is not a given in a city where black-box theaters keep losing their leases; Ray of Light's site advertises a "Building the Barbary" effort, the slow work of making a permanent room out of a rented one.

Tickets run $41 to $71 at rayoflighttheatre.com. Remaining performances land Thursdays through Saturdays, with 2 p.m. matinees on weekends, closing with a 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. double on Aug. 29. The Barbary Stage sits a 10-minute walk from the Embarcadero BART and Muni station; street parking, the theater notes, is free after 6. It's a corner that empties out when the offices close for the day — and, three or four nights a week through the end of the month, one that fills back up for a musical about a drought.