A cynical, riotous adult puppet show is a tonic for anyone over 30
Avenue Q
Noël Coward Theatre, London WC2
You can almost hear the plan for Avenue Q being hatched by a bunch of students during a night that involved too much red wine. "Hey! Let's do Sesame Street! But a RUDE version!" "Yeah! With loads of SEX, and bad language, and homophobia, and racism!"
This is the essence of the show: a juvenile gag based on screwing adult issues on to the format of a sugary children's programme. This Tony award-winning Broadway transfer is so slick, however, the joke so well-conceived and the young, largely local cast so able that it induces great belly laughs of recognition in a style reminiscent of Jerry Springer: the opera.
The curtain rises to show Avenue Q itself - a row of houses filled, in the classic, kids' TV-show manner, with a bunch of humans who unquestioningly exist beside a load of hairy puppets. The human beings have that superbly democratic casting that any parent familiar with Barney the Dinosaur or the Muppets will recognise. There's the fat, white, funny man (Siôn Lloyd); the mumsy Asian American with a crazy name, Christmas Eve (Ann Harada, who played the original role on Broadway); and a baseball-hat-toting black guy (Giles Terera), who in an inspired plot twist turns out to be a former child celebrity.
Alongside them live their puppet friends: Kate Monster, an earnest, wide-eyed glove of fur, Rod the closet gay, his straight room-mate Nicky, new kid Princeton, and the horned and hairy Trekkie Monster, who is a pervert. Pervert? He likes downloading porn from the internet. Porn? In a kids' show? There lies the joke.
With the humans and their animated furry friends are four puppet wranglers central to the staging. No effort is made to hide them; miked and in full make-up, they pull off the remarkable feat of a) singing all the songs, b) making all the suitable facial expressions, while c) operating a puppet's mouth, head and hands. It's very clever. They even take the puppets off into the wings with a series of little bobs, as if the puppet itself is walking. Sometimes the actors double up, sharing a puppet; sometimes they swap puppets midway; and all the while singing, dancing, and, at one point, simulating puppet sex. It's like watching Olympic figure skating, with some lewdness thrown in for good measure.
Avenue Q smashes great holes in the papery world that children's programmes faithfully create, and in which we hope our little ones believe. No one has a great life on Avenue Q; everyone has a life that "sucks". So much for living - what about loving, that great pre-school mantra? As Kate Monster (played superbly by Julie Atherton) ruefully says, in her perfect mid-Atlantic squeak, "the more you love someone . . . the more you want to kill them". Yes, it gets laughs.
Equally, our adult ways are lauded to the heights. Schadenfreude ("Isn't that some kind of Nazi word?" queries one character) is acknowledged as a vital cog in the world's great machine. Avenue Q itself is presented as a nihilistic place of no certainties, no loyalties and no meaning - so, just like everyday life then. Indeed, when Kate Monster is abandoned at the top of the Empire State Building, she serenades her heartbreak, hair blowing in the wind, and you know just how she feels. Who cares that she's only a puppet?
There's a feel-good ending, but not in the way of, say, Billy Elliot. Billy, a musical set in an England aching for verisimilitude, is a good deal more fairy-tale than Avenue Q, which depicts puppets living in a wholly fictional version of New York. And, whereas the message of the boy dancer is the straightforward one of "follow your dreams", Avenue Q is about how to live once you know that the "follow your dreams" shtick is just that. In short, it's a perfect night out for anyone over 30.
Help other people! Come to terms with yourself! Enjoy the moment! These are the sentiments with which Avenue Q leaves you, after a night bursting with invention, bawdiness and dollops of stage chutzpah. As Gary, the former child star, says: "I haven't felt so good since I sued my parents."
Booking details available at www.avenueq.com
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