My friend Joe and I saw Avenue Q tonight at the John Golden Theatre. I was pleasantly surprised and greatly amused. In my mind, I hate musicals because the songs get shoehorned into unlikely moments and put feelings I’d rather see enacted into hamfisted lyrics. The songs work in Avenue Q because most are sung by puppets, and if Sesame Street taught me anything it’s that puppets can (nay, must) sing. Also, as you’ve probably heard, the songs are politically incorrect and feature naughty words. Many hit near my heart with subjects like getting out of one’s apartment to enjoy the city, making mixtapes, racism, gay friends and, in a song by a puppet that sounds suspiciously like Cookie Monster, internet pornography. So many quick references and humorous turns on New York facts and myths: dropping a penny off the empire state building, easy NYU girls, the challenge of a black man successfully hailing a cab and many more.
The pacing is speedy and there’s hardly time at all for dialogue as the songs hit one after another, but the play boiled-down is a love-story: Princeton, a puppet just out of college, moves to Brooklyn and tries to find his purpose in life while having an off-and-on relationship with another puppet, Kate Monster. Strangely, the puppets not only mingle with human actors, the puppeteers mimic the movements, sightlines and facial expressions of the puppets they’re controlling. It took me a while to figure out what I was supposed to be focusing on, but I ended up watching mainly the puppets.