At best, it’s a Sesame Street for canny adults, with unusually intelligent songs about everything from “It Sucks to be Me,” to a celebration of “Schadenfreude.” We’re on an avenue in New York City, nicely designed by Eric W. Haak to feature an old brick front apartment building backed by a silhouette of the Manhattan skyline. Among the puppets we meet are Princeton (the ingratiating Ricky Cona), a young man at the start of his adult work and love careers; Kate Monster (endearing Julia Rifino), a schoolteacher who dreams of opening an academy for little monsters; Brian and Christmas Eve (fine Derek Baxter and Caitlin Greene) a well-meaning couple contemplating a long-delayed marriage; Gary Coleman (sharp Jade Turner), a child celebrity who’s now superintendent of the apartment house; Rod (Cona again), a closeted gay man who insists, in a funny song, that he has a girlfriend in Canada; and Nicky (Cody Carlson), his roommate who wants him to know that it’s safe to out himself. Then there are my favorite three characters, favorite because they manage to escape the all-too-entirely expectable fates of the others: Lucy Slut (at various times Ashley Lord and Rifino), an aficionado of sex who doesn’t like her guys clingy, and the Bad Idea Bears (Lord and Ryan M. Sturm), two enablers out of the Collective Unconscious who tell sober people to drink up, and depressed people to hang themselves. The central plot of the play is about Princeton’s evolving relationship with Kate Monster, though there are plotlets having to do with Christmas Eve’s availability as a psychotherapist, Nicky’s experience as a homeless puppet, Lucy Slut’s predations, and Rod’s encounter with his own gayness.
And everyone of these problems is solved in the most obvious, least imaginative way that author Jeff Whitty might have concocted. I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone who might find Whitty’s plotting suspenseful, so I’ll simply say this: Look at the conundrums facing the characters in Act One, and decide what ploddingly ordinary solution might most happily solve them. Congratulations: That’s what happens. Another defect: with the exception of Lucy and the Bears, everyone of Avenue Q’s characters has such a big heart of gold, the adult encounter with evil — part of any real world’s texture — never needs to take place. It’s meaningful to me that the complex, knowing lyrics of the musical were (like the music) written by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, who clearly have a different world view than does book-writer Whitty. When a plot that points resolutely toward “happily ever after” includes a song that asserts things are “Only For Now,” it’s pretty obvious why Avenue Q disputes itself. Fortunately, the songs are so clever, it’s mostly possible to enjoy them without any troublesome effort to make them fit the narrative.
But then there are those characters — Lucy Slut and the Bad Idea Bears — who stand out from the rest because they can’t be resolved with a simplistic happy ending. Director Paul E. Finocchiaro does a wonderful job with Lucy especially, turning this blonde, buxom puppet into one of the randiest, sultriest femmes fatales ever to bat dark-lined eyes. Another great success is the four-piece offstage band of Thomas Guthrie, William Bryant, Jim Rungo and Stephen Padgett. This show sounds good, and offers choice anthems like “The Internet Is For Porn,” and “There Is Life Outside Your Apartment.” There’s even a tune about wanting to go back to college, where life was a lot easier.
Bottom line: this is a musical with its signals crossed. There’s much to like here, and much to regret. I was tickled half the time. And bored, the other half. Can I recommend it?
Yes. No.
Mark E. Leib's theater criticism for CL has won seven awards for excellence from the Society for Professional Journalists. His own plays have been produced Off-Broadway and in Chicago, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and the Tampa Bay Area. He is a Continuing Instructor at USF, and has an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama, where he won the CBS Foundation Prize in Playwriting. Contact him here.
This article appears in May 4-11, 2017.