By Nial Harrison-Morry (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: September 4, 2013
Avenue Q‘s current run in Vancouver plays until September 14. The runtime is two hours, 15 minutes with one intermission.
Avenue Q took the stage this summer and its stay has been extended into the fall at the Granville Arts Club with puppets and music that adults who grew up with Sesame Street and The Muppets will love.
Avenue Q is a play about life as a twenty-something fresh out of college, broke and thinking “now what?” The opening number is reminiscent of the theme from The Muppets, or some other sort of kids’ TV show, but speaks about the daily grind of working a low-paying job. The opening segues directly into “What do you do with a B.A. in English” which introduces the main character, Princeton, and outlines the central dilemma for this show: after years of post-secondary education, with no money and no marketable skills, what do you do?
The answer seems to be that you find a cheap place to live and try to figure out your life without falling behind on your bills. As bad as this situation is, there is always someone whose life sucks more than yours – as we learn with the musical number “It Sucks To Be Me”.
The script is beautifully written, with subtle references to related works like Sesame Street and Rent. The dialogue is witty with an oddball, almost puckish sense of humour, and it deals with several social issues of surprising gravitas (“Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”) with great aplomb, sensitivity, and honesty – which makes it a surprisingly good comparison to Sesame Street for adults; it’s educational and very entertaining. The sex scene (because the puppets lack anything below the waist) is funny, enjoyable, sexy, and enthusiastic all at the same time, without for a second losing their innocent mien or the graphic nature of the proceedings. Their neighbors even participate and shout out advice, and no one is offended because they’re puppets, which lends a sort of innocence to the whole raunchy song (“You Can Be As Loud As the Hell You Want When You’re Makin’ Love”).
One of my favourite things about this show is that it is current. So many shows are reproductions of great classics from the past or period pieces that I find it refreshing to see a show which needs no explanation or knowledge of history. This show is bright, fresh, and none of the references or social mores need to be explained because it is set in the here and now (-ish. We are, after all, talking about a musical mostly populated by puppets).
The staging of Avenue Q is unique in that the puppeteers are acting as much as the regular actors, with just as much physicality and facial expression, in addition to operating a puppet. After a few minutes of watching the show, the imagination takes over, filling in the spaces between them until you can’t really see the difference between the puppets and their operators; all you focus on are the puppet characters, but they still have the actors behind them, providing subtleties of non-verbal communication a puppet cannot. The use of puppetry and regular actors allows for operatic-style casting, where the voice is the primary determining factor, not physical appearance, and it paid off: the live music was of such wonderful quality that I couldn’t tell if it was live or recorded. The only reason I knew the show wasn’t entirely recorded was because I could see the musicians playing and the actors singing throughout the show.
The subtlety, execution, and aptness of the technical designs for the show were all (with minor exceptions) very well done. Because Avenue Q is set in a fictional area of New York where the rent is extremely cheap, you can see all the detritus that normally accumulates in such neighborhoods: injection needles, cigarette butts, garbage and old newspapers, worn-down curbs, and a broken light fixture which has been neither replaced nor repaired.
Another interesting (and well done) facet of this performance is the wonderful integration of video and stage craft. At the start of the show, the preshow speech is a projected video (two screens, one in each of the upper right and left corners of the prosceneum, respectively) which segues naturally into the opening song and distracts attention from the stage until it is time for the live performers to take over. This greatly facilitates the magic of theatre, because the audience is distracted while the lights change and cast and crew get into position. Throughout the show, there are various apt supporting uses for the projection; when Lucy is in hospital, her heartbeat is shown on the screens. Intermission is announced in the same way as the preshow speech and at the end of the show there are production credits, just like you might find in a movie, which play as the audience leaves the theatre. Unfortunately, this makes some pages of the program somewhat superfluous.
Avenue Q is what cartoons would be like if they were real life, and the quirky, dirty, oddball humor is wonderful. The audience gets all the brutal realities of real life, except the rough edges have been smoothed away through the use of puppetry, which allows the show to include graphic sexual content and a surprisingly frank discussion on racism. Despite the deceptively innocent appearance of Avenue Q, it is definitely a show intended for an adult audience – the number of sexual positions used onstage is ample proof of that.
