Friendly neighbours, where the air is blue

AVENUE Q
Noel Coward Theatre

A CHIPPER, high-kicking chorus-line song called “everyone’s a little bit racist”, an in-the-closet Republican and a contrived love story featuring a young woman who wants to open a school for disadvantaged kids – a potentially disastrous storyline recipe, no?
But make all the characters puppets and throw in a dash of retro Sesame Street magic and this bawdy Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx musical bizarrely hits the comedy spot.
In this thoroughly non-PC New York street there’s no Cookie Monster, only the porn-addicted Trekkie Monster, and Rod and Nicky – a very grown-up and issue-laden Burt and Ernie. Next door lives aspiring nursery teacher Kate Monster who wants to set up a school for “people of fur” and save her beau, the preppy Princeton, from the clutches of saucy club singer Lucy the Slut.
To an upbeat live band, the cast of mainly British actors offer faultless cheesy New York accents.
Brits Simon Lipkin (Nicky, Trekkie Monster and one of the Bad Idea Bears) and Julie Atherton (Kate Monster and Lucy the Slut) even manage to voice two characters almost simultaneously.
All the while, Sesame Street’s famous educational cartoons are wonderfully subverted – apparently if you re-arrange the letters in ‘unemployed’, it spells ‘opportunity’.
So if you’ve got the stomach for watching naked puppets involved in acts that couldn’t possibly be described in a family newspaper, I can tell you how to get, how to get to Avenue Q.

Until January 2007

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