I like to pride myself that I’m not a bad judge of what a play or show is going to be like. I’ve either seen it before, know the actors, read the reviews or at least I know the basic premise of the piece. But sometimes I just don’t fancy a show, it just doesn’t seem to be my sort of thing. Although I like a good laugh and a bit of song and dance as much as the next man, on the brow meter my tastes would be at the high end. I know, as your trusted reviewer, I should be objective, but everyone’s a little bit prejudiced sometimes.
Into the category of ‘don’t fancy at all’ fell Avenue Q. I was thinking Muppets, Sesame Street – in fact anything that involved a good deal of brightly coloured synthetic fabrics, a lot of stuffing and almost certainly some denim dungarees. I wasn’t interested. But I was wrong, very wrong indeed.
Fab! Totally bloody fab. I loved it. Yes, it is The Muppets and yes, it is Sesame Street and yes, I have to admit, there are denim dungarees. But, and it’s a big but, although there is a good deal of swearing and profanity in both dialogue and songs and there is, wait for it, full-frontal puppet nudity and live-on-stage puppet sex, to say Avenue Q is an ‘adult’ (nudge-nudge) version of the other two shows would be doing it a grave injustice. It is just, by any standards, a very good musical. There are lots of good songs, lots of excellent singing, a good story line and some good jokes.
One obvious way in which it differs from The Muppets is that the actors working the puppets are in full view and are acting rather than just operating their woolly friends. So you get actor and puppet moving, acting and singing in unison. It takes some getting used to but I think most of the time everyone just watches the puppets. The puppets represent human and non-human characters, as if they were emotional beings in a light-hearted, quasi-fantasy environment. Set in a New York street everything is presented very pragmatically with no attempt made to explain why some of the human characters are played by puppets, while three of them are played by actual humans.
To call them operators or puppeteers would be committing another grave injustice. The actors are an integral part of the show, their personalities as important as those of the puppet characters they create. The two leads when I saw it were outstanding. Sarah Harlington played the main female character, Kate Monster, but doubled as Lucy the Slut, sometimes simultaneously. She had outstanding voice characterisation and sang and moved beautifully. The male lead was Richard Lowe, who also played two characters with energy and a great deal of sympathy. I could have watched them all night long.
Avenue Q is unique in as much as it involves the style and presentation of children’s shows to deal with serious adult issues such as racism, homelessness, pornography, homosexuality and schadenfreude. Avenue Q is a coming-of-age parable with graduate Princeton searching for his identity and place in the world. Unlike children’s puppet shows, the characters face real-world adult problems with uncertain outcomes and no guarantees of a happy ending. But what I liked best is that Avenue Q takes political correctness and shows it up for the impostor that it is. Who could resist songs like If You Were Gay, Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist, The Internet is for Porn, You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want (When You’re Makin’ Love) and Schadenfreude? Sesame Street it ain’t.
Avenue Q is a show like no other. It brings together elements with which we are all familiar and presents them in a hotch-potch of styles, ranging from children’s TV puppet show to lavish musical with a lot of serious issues and drama thrown in for good measure. If you haven’t seen it I recommend that you do. If you don’t fancy it, you don’t think it’s your kind of thing, think again. The show has so much feel-good factor that you’d have to be a real curmudgeon not to love it. ★★★★★ Michael Hasted at Cheltenham Everyman, 21/07/15
Photo Credit – Matt Martin Photography
