Jon Robyns & Rod in Avenue Q
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There’s a lot that’s borrowed—and quite a bit that’s blue—in
Avenue Q, which is nevertheless that rare thing: a genuinely original new musical, not based on a pre-existing film or book. But it is also full of cultural touchstones that make it both familiar and accessible, yet entirely its own animal. After originating off-Broadway in February 2003, it transferred to Broadway that July, where it is still playing. Now, three years later, it inaugurates the handsomely restored, renamed Noel Coward Theatre (formerly the Albery), and I imagine that Coward, watching from a perch in the gods, would appreciate the show’s subversive, ironic wit and the catchy potency of its cheap music, that he, too, once specialised in creating.
Rent, which followed a similar journey from downtown to uptown a decade ago, courtesy of some of the same commercial producers now behind this musical, was set amongst the struggling artists of the East Village’s Alphabet City (so named because the Avenues there are designated A to D). The first joke (and part tribute) of Avenue Q is in its title, which is so far down the alphabet that its setting is off the map, somewhere that the programme calls an “outer borough of New York City.”
But if we are once again in a similarly youthful milieu of characters trying to find their way in the world, Avenue Q is a far more sunny, funny affair. Instead of the life-and-death spectre of AIDS that haunts Rent, this is designed mainly to offer a revue-like home for some witty, zippy songs that cleverly lay out the modern preoccupations of its characters, from the wonders of the web (“The Internet is for Porn”) and admitting to racism (“Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist”) to being in the closet (“My Girlfriend, Who Lives in Canada”).
Clare Foster, Simon Lipkin
& Trekkie Monster in Avenue Q
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Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx’s jaunty, infectious score doesn’t so much advance character as define and demystify those attitudes. Though I was frequently reminded of such off-Broadway shows as
Snoopy and
Is There Life After High School? (“I Wish I Could Go Back to College” could have been lifted directly from the latter), there’s such affection and charm in it that you are entirely swept along. That’s also thanks to the show’s chief trump card: the fact that the population
of Avenue Q is mostly performed by puppets, and Anna Louizos’ versatile tenement row set (that also houses the band) very cleverly folds puppet-scale room environments within it.
In 1982, Cameron Mackintosh, co-producer of the West End transfer of this show as well as its landlord, made his first original transatlantic producing foray by helping to move Little Shop of Horrors to an extended off-Broadway life, and while a puppet plant featured large, in every sense, in that show, here they’re at the heart and art of it. Avenue Q forges something original of its own out of a fusion of an adult version of the Muppet Show by way of South Park.
Four of the seven-strong ensemble cast seamlessly blends the barriers between puppeteer and performer, as they each serially inhabit a variety of puppet characters, from Princeton, the recent university graduate who arrives on Avenue Q looking for a home, and finds love with Kate Monster to closeted gay Rod and his roommate Nicky. Jon Robyns, Julie Atherton, Simon Lipkin and Clare Foster are the superb, selfless quartet who switch with sublime versatility between puppet characters, while Ann Harada (the sole member of the original U.S. company to recreate her performance here) is joined by Sion Lloyd and Giles Terera as the human components. All in all it is impossible not to fall in love with director Jason Moore’s ingenious and good-humoured production.
Avenue Q
Music and Lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx
Book by Jeff Whitty, based on an original concept by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx
Directed by Jason Moore
Noel Coward Theatre