Jeff Marx and Bobby Lopez

About the authors:
Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx began writing Avenue Q in the BMI Workshop in 1999, thinking it was a great idea for a TV series. Three years later the musical was debuted at off-Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre and was a quick hit with both critics and theatergoing urbanites, all of which took to the grown-up life lessons that the show has to offer. Audiences continued to grow when the little-show-that-could transferred to Broadway's Golden Theatre in the summer of 2003 to even more widespread rave reviews. Tony voters agreed with the critics and awarded Avenue Q as the Best Musical of the season as well as choosing to honor its young writers trophies for Best Original Score and Best Book of a Musical. Lopez and Marx are currently writing the screenplay and songs for a new movie-musical for Universal Pictures as well as writing a new Broadway musical with Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park. Their other works include a new Muppet movie, Kermit, Prince of Denmark (which received the coveted Ed Kleban Award) and Ferdinand the Bull, a children's musical for TheatreWorks/USA. Here, the two collaborators discuss the transfer of their hit musical to the London stage.

Robert Lopez: Hi, I'm Bobby Lopez.

Jeff Marx: And I'm Jeff Marx.

RL: Isn’t this exciting? We've been asked by Theatre.com to write a piece about our musical, Avenue Q!

JM: Didn’t they ask us to do this once before?

RL: Well, yes, but that was Broadway.com, their sister site in America. And it was three years ago.

JM: Oh. So why are we doing it again?

RL: Because now the show's opening in London!

JM: Ah, yes. Yay! Cheers!

RL: We're supposed to tell them all about the show, from the creators' perspective.

JM: Should we do it like with a British accent?

RL: Naw, let's just be ourselves. The show's about 97% the same as it is on Broadway. There are just a few minor improvements.

JM: One is that new song we added.

RL: We'll get to that... Let's start with how Avenue Q started.

JM: Avenue Q started with two kids writing about themselves and trying to crack each other up. After about five years of sweat, blood and rewrites, it
became a smash Broadway hit that won all the big Tony Awards and is still running strong, now in its fourth year.

Jeff Marx, Bobby Lopez and a couple of Q stars

RL: Let's back up. We began writing Avenue Q in the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop...

JM: We should probably be clear that Avenue Q is a musical comedy. It's funny and subversive, and most of its main characters are puppets.

RL: Oh yeah, it's a sort of mock-educational show like Sesame Street, where singing puppets live together with singing people, and it's set in an outer borough of New York, in a made-up neighborhood called Avenue Q, where the rents are affordable. A lot like Brooklyn, but more run down, thus affordable.

JM: They're twentysomethings and thirtysomethings, and they're temping, catering, working as assistants and such. They're not using their skills and
talents, they're not growing into the happy, fulfilled people they want to be, and they're realizing that they're not very special, despite what their parents led them to believe.

RL: But together, they help each other deal with all the problems the real world throws at them--small and large. They usually do this in songs like "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist" and "The More You Love Someone, The More You Want To Kill Them."

JM: The show is also sorta racy. There's a song called, "You Can Be As Loud As the Hell You Want (When You're Makin' Love)" which features full puppet nudity and puppet sex.

RL: And there's funny animation and videos, and these cute little evil puppets called the Bad Idea Bears who lead the other characters into making all kinds of stupid mistakes. You may have Bad Idea Bears in your own life...

JM: So, here's how it all began. When we first met and started working together, we put our heads together and wondered why people our age generally weren't big fans of musical theatre.

RL: We figured it was because musicals are so obviously artificial--everyone knows that people don't just walk down the street and break out into song...

JM: Straight people don't, anyway!

RL: But puppets sing and nobody thinks twice.

JM: So we started creating a set of puppet characters and a world for them to inhabit.

RL: And we thought it would be funny, and touching, to create a world based on the one we lived in, and base the puppets on us and our friends and make them very, very real people going through the frustrations we were going through in our lives.

JM: Princeton, the naïve 22-year-old who has nothing to his name but his BA in English, was based on a lot of both of our post-graduate temping experiences.

RL: And Princeton's love interest, Kate Monster, the 25-year-old kindergarten teaching assistant, is loosely based on a girl we both know who's a total sweetheart, but who's having trouble finding the right relationship.

JM: And the two roommates, Nicky and Rod, were inspired by this married couple we know. (But also inspired by a pair of roommates you might remember from TV.) It's not them, but it's sorta like them.

RL: After we had written a big bunch of songs, we brought in some more amazingly talented collaborators--Jeff Whitty, the bookwriter, and Jason Moore, the director--to help us figure out the story, and shape it into the musical that ran off-Broadway, on Broadway, in Vegas and is about to open at the Noel Coward Theatre.

JM: Umm, what else should we add?

RL: Let's talk about working with Cameron Mackintosh.

Cameron Mackintosh

JM: Ha!

RL: We love Cameron. He invited us out last summer to his beautiful house in Somerset.

JM: And while we were there, of course, he sat us down at his nine-foot Steinway grand and gave us about a hundred suggestions for how to improve our show.

RL: Many of which were brilliant!

JM: Well, he is Cameron Mackintosh.

RL: Oh I forgot... He even asked us to put a brand new song into the show that we’re really excited about.

JM: You're gonna love this!

RL: We've got a really great British cast.

JM: And their American accents are unbelievable! They totally fooled us!

RL: The six-man band rocks (even though you won't see them until the end, because they're hidden behind the set).

JM: And the puppets are awesome. We don't want to tell you too much more, except that it's a fun show. Ask your friends about it. Better yet, bring
them!

RL: Jeez, Jeff, is this an interview or an ad?

JM: It was an interview, now it's an ad.

RL: Well in that case, Avenue Q's at the Noel Coward Theatre.

JM: Formerly the Albery.

RL: Come!