Naked dolls! Have sex! Avenue Q’s energetic, foul-mouthed music is back Musicals

THere are some of the issues you might expect when rehearsing a West End musical. Then there are the problems that arise today, regarding the indolence of a prominent actor. “This is too flexible,” protests actor Noah Harrison, who has difficulty choreographing because his dance partner lacks a spine. No crime is taken, beware: the offender is made of felt. It’s time to replace that fabric character with a sturdier one, and there are plenty to choose from. Row upon row of Sesame Street-like puppets surround the room, each waiting for their moment in the spotlight.

This is Q Street, a hit from Broadway to London, with songs by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marks, and a book by Jeff Whitty, which has now been revived to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the play’s West End premiere. When it was first released, its mix of multicolored children’s television puppets, real-world problems (sex, racism, housing crisis, existential perversion) and outrageous songs seemed genuinely surprising, and earned Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Score. But the young people to whom she directed her story are now adults, and a new generation can benefit from the tale she has to tell.

So says director Jason Moore, who first directed the show when it was also a rosy-cheeked up-and-comer, and is now back in the director’s chair at 55. “It’s unusual for a director to revisit the show he made the first time,” he says.

The revival is described as a “love letter to the original,” which means something other than a straightforward retcon. “Well, it’s not a reinterpretation,” Moore explains. “I’ll let you [radical theatre auteur] Ivo van Hove does his version. Please do: I can’t imagine anything better. “But there are some things that need to change in terms of supply, and now we have an opportunity.”

I wonder if he means there’s Gary Coleman among the show’s dramatic characters — a joke about the star of the 1980s sitcom Diff’rent Strokes that might baffle Generation Z. But no, Gary (portrayed in fiction as a down-on-his-luck building janitor) is intact, with context added. What Moore is referring to is the show’s scale, its artistic ambition – both of which have now been upgraded – and its cultural sensitivity, or otherwise, to which we will return.

For the revival, Moore asked the young cast for a specific set of traits: “One of the currencies of Avenue Q is that it has an innocence. I’m looking for actors who have that hopeful, expectant quality that you have in your early 20s.” He also sought to acquire the ability to move puppets, a skill that “the actor’s instincts are of little use to them.”

Actress Emily Benjamin, who as a teenager was obsessed with Avenue Q, later played Sally Bowles in the West End. Today she sings a sad song (“There’s a fine line between reality and pretend”) on behalf of the doll, Kate Munster, who was dumped by her boyfriend, the series’ hero Princeton. “Puppetry involves the death of the ego for the actor,” says Benjamin. “There is a removal of what you acted for, which is the central thing that people look at.” But there are positives: “Singing is an open thing. There’s fear, there’s anxiety about the voice. But when you have something else to think about, in this case the puppet, I worry about my voice less than ever.”

Puppet director Eastyn Evans says there was a need for an unusual kind of puppetry for Avenue Q, which takes a familiar form of animation from television and puts it on stage with the animators in full view. “So, you have the puppet characters, you have the humans who operate those puppet characters, and you have the humans who interact with them.” It’s a lot — and that’s before you add the 2000s-era lyrics and attitudes that “I have exclamation marks around,” Benjamin wisely says, “and that I don’t think would necessarily fit.” She stated that there were company-wide talks to adjudicate songs such as “Everyone’s a Little Racist” and “If You’re Gay”. While she and Moore believe in the show’s fundamental good nature, they acknowledge that sensibilities have changed and it may need to be adjusted in dialogue with its new audiences.

“The audience caught Street Q,” Moore says, “because this kind of subversive comedy had never been seen in a Broadway musical before. And to see naked dolls having sex was a violation. And now you have Oh, Mary! and The Book of Mormon, that tone is unknown.” “But the transgressive parts are still transgressive. We’re still having the same cultural conversations. There’s a different set of sensibilities around it, but what the show is really asking is: Can we do better in these areas?”

That’s why he’s confident the music will continue to resonate. “Young people are always trying to figure out their way in the world. These topics, like ‘How do you give your life meaning?’, will never go away.” And could the antics of a group of hand puppets, flexible or otherwise, encourage a new generation to engage with them?

“They may be just scraps of cloth, but people often empathize more directly with something that isn’t real than with a human being telling the same story,” Benjamin says.