Avenue Q

Schedule	Buy Tickets
Ongoing	Mon, Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sat, 2:30pm; Sun, 3pm, 7:30pm

Profile

Avenue Q is a puppet musical that takes off from, saucily spoofs, and cheekily de-kidifies Sesame Street. Several Sesame characters’ caricatures populate the godforsaken Avenue Q where the play and some of the characters are laid.

Princeton laments in song the uselessness of his just-acquired B.A. in English: Every apartment from Avenue A to P costing too much, he rents on Q, from the super, a young black woman with attitude who turns out to be Gary Coleman. Other live denizens�the fat, unemployed would-be comic, Brian, and his exaggeratedly Japanese therapist fiancée, Christmas Eve�sympathize with Princeton.

Even more sympathetic is the homely puppet Kate Monster, who falls for him. Less sympathetic are puppet roommates Rod, a buttoned-up suit of an investment banker and closet queen; and Nicky, a charming ne’er-do-well, who assures Rod in song about obliging him, �If I were gay (but I am not gay).� Other puppet characters are Trekkie Monster�whom the puppets’ creator (and one of the puppeteers), Rick Lyon, describes as �the love child of the Grinch and Chewbacca�a masturbator to Internet porn (song: �The Internet’s for Porn�); also Lucy T. Slut, the Mae West�ish knockoff of Miss Piggy; and the mean kindergarten teacher Lavinia Thistletwat, whose assistant-drudge Kate Monster is.

Princeton desperately seeks a purpose in life; Kate Monster needs money to start a school for monsters (a Monsterssori School, natch!); Christmas Eve, an unsuccessful therapist despite two M.A.’s, needs patients; Rod must find the guts to uncloset himself; Brian must commit to Christmas Eve�they finally have a Jewish wedding; and the two mischievous Bad Idea Bears, who make trouble for all, must reform, which, in a funny way, they eventually do. Out of such ingredients, we get an X-rated puppet show that has fun with racism (song: �Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist�), homosexuality, full frontal puppet nudity and sex, schadenfreude (song: �Schadenfreude�), obsession with porn, and other things that Sesame Street, from which some of these perpetrators graduated, couldn’t do.

The show is clever, but in a sophomoric way; one torch song begins, �There’s a fine fine line/ Between a lover and a friend,� and there’s an even finer fine line between smart and smart-ass. Yes, the puppets are funny; the live actors as well as the puppeteers who, in plain view, act along with their puppets are versatile and personable; and persiflage in song and dialogue skips along in blissful smuttiness. Thus the closeted Rob boasts about a (fictitious) Canadian, and therefore absent, girlfriend: �Her name is Alberta, / She lives in Vancouver. / She cooks like my mother / And sucks like a Hoover.� The creators are Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx, and Jeff Whitty, and it’s a moot question whether the show is too whitty or too jeff by half. The audience members at the preview I attended were ecstatic: The laughter and applause were barely distinguishable in decibels from a terrorist raid. They all seemed to be graduates of a Monsterssori School.

The characters of Avenue Q express their secret longings in a song entitled �I Wish I Could Go Back to College.� The authors and their director, Jason Moore, I assume, have no such problems: In their hearts and minds, they’re already there. — John Simon