AVENUE Q []
At the John Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th St. (212) 239-6200.
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‘AVENUE Q” is a pup pet show for people who hate puppet shows.
A mix of real people and puppets – often more real than the people – “Avenue Q” is a long way from “Sesame Street.” In fact, if it were a film it would be rated NC-17, with four-letter words and explicit puppet sex.
But it’s in the same city as Jim Henson’s Muppets, if not the same neighborhood.
A hot ticket at off-Broadway’s Vineyard Theater, it has transferred seamlessly to Broadway. The production that opened last night at the Golden Theatre looks better and breathes more easily in the larger space.
Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, who supplied the concept, music and lyrics of “Avenue Q,” took a kiddie show – inspirational values and all – and roughly turned it inside out.
It still offers moral values but gives them a sweet, very funny but cheerfully satiric twist. It is, of necessity, cartoonish but never ill-tempered.
Jeff Whitty’s book concerns a young college graduate named Princeton with an English degree, no job and nowhere to live – until he arrives at Avenue Q, just about the last stop in Alphabet City.
Here he acquires a cheap walk-up and meets a girl, a homely kindergarten aide named Kate Monster, who has almost given up hope for a serious relationship.
Despite Princeton’s dallying with the local bad girl, Lucy T. Slut, it all ends happily.
It even ends happily for the uptight gay Rod, who finally erupts from his closet to welcome back his straight roommate, Nicky; the reclusive Trekkie Monster, who lives to watch porn on the Internet; and Lucy, who abandons her slutty ways.
The tuneful music is in that upbeat, old-fashioned style; the lyrics are wickedly naughty and – like Jason Moore’s cunning staging, Anna Louizos’ tenement setting and Mirena Rada’s costumes – suggest a TV kiddie show gone wild and rancid.
There are three fine human performers: Jordan Gelber, Ann Harada and Natalie Venetia Bacon, the latter playing the building super Gary Coleman (yes, that Gary Coleman).
Even so, the puppets and their singing and dancing onstage puppeteers – John Tartaglia, Stephanie D’Abruzzo and Rick Lyon, well-supported by Jennifer Barnhart – steal the show.
Lyon also designed the Muppet-style puppets, and it is miraculous how these wide-mouthed, goggle-eyed creatures can be made so poignantly expressive.
This young-at-heart show is good dirty fun.
