Review: Avenue Q
Taken from the Jewish Chronicle (requires subscription) - 7|7|06
X- rated puppets: John Nathan reports on an American musical show which attempts to do for puppetry what South Park did for cartoons
The musical import from New York does for puppets what "South Park" did for cartoons. The rite-of-passage hero here is Princeton, who, fresh out of college, can only afford to live in Brooklyn's down-at-heel Avenue Q, a sort of racially diverse "Sesame Street".
And like the iconic kids' TV show, "Avenue Q" doles out well-meaning morality lessons about how everyone should get along, even if, as one of the cutesy songs has it, "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist".
Orange-skinned, nice-looking, Jewish Princeton wants to find his "purpose" in life and on the way falls head-over-heels (or rather, head over his human puppeteer's arm) in love with Kate Monster who, one day, would like to open a school for little monsters or "people with fur".
She and Princeton (arm and voice provided by Jon Robyns) then engage in probably the most graphic, and definitely the funniest sex scene on the London stage. And then Princeton gets cold feet about commitment and is seduced by Lucy The Slut from the local strip bar.
The problem with this occasionally hilarious show is that creators Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, and book writer Jeff Whitty, have got one big Joke in their locker - using puppets to illustrate adult behaviour - and eventually wears thin.
One of the smaller jokes, that Gary (Giles Terera) is in fact the African-American child sitcom actor Gary Colman, doomed as an adult to deal with his post-celebrity existence, is a running gag that only hobbles along with a British audience.
Still, of the performances, Julie Atherton does an excellent job as the voice and arm behind both good-hearted Kate and Lucy the Slut. And any show which revels in a song called "Schadenfreude" knows something about human nature.