Avenue Q, review – A Gen-X time capsule that should have stayed buried – UK Times

Think back to the turn of the century. Political correctness had “gone mad”, so it was said, and the cutting edge of comedy was a battleground for the busting of new taboos. Gen-Xers, weaned on the ironic, pop-culture-literature nectar of The Simpsons, were making their own stabs at transgression. It was an era that gave us Family Guy, South Park, and, on stage, Avenue Q, a musical that dared to ask the all-important question: what if the puppets in Sesame Street were all professionally listless, sexually active young adults? Audiences, cynical and pop-culturally savvy themselves, ate it up. Avenue Q beat fledgling box office behemoth Wicked to the big Tony Award win that year, a victory for the snarky contrarian. But that was then, and this is now.

Twenty-three years have passed since Avenue Q premiered (in its initial incarnation, off-Broadway), and 16 since its West End run came to an end. Now it’s back, revived at London’s Shaftesbury Theatre. The world has changed, and Avenue Q has not. Bar the odd modified line – a reference to streaming here, a joke about AI there, and one whooped-at insertion of “TRUMP!” – this is the same show as ever, its crassness, problematic edges, and idiosyncratically Bush-era sensibility preserved in theatrical amber.

The show follows Princeton (Noah Harrison), a felt puppet and purposeless college grad who moves to the best neighbourhood he can afford – the shabby Avenue Q – and starts dating the plucky and idealistic Kate Monster (Emily Benjamin). His other neighbours are similarly oddballs. There’s Rod (also Harrison) and Nicky (Charlie McCullagh) – basically Bert and Ernie if Bert was a closeted homosexual Republican and Ernie a lusted-after, straight slob. There are two humans: dismal comedian Brian (Oliver Jacobson) and his partner Christmas Eve (Amelia Kinu Muus), a self-possessed Japanese woman with a cartoonishly thick accent. And there’s Gary Coleman (played by Dionne Ward-Anderson), based on the real-world former child star of Diff’rent Strokes fame, now working as the building superintendent, having fallen on hard times.

There is perhaps no starker synecdoche for Avenue Q’s problems than the Gary Coleman character – once a somewhat cruel but wryly specific spoof that carries so little cultural currency today it’s almost avante garde. The real Coleman (who, incidentally, did not approve of his depiction, and threatened to sue Avenue Q’s creators) has now been dead for 16 years, and you’d be extremely hard pressed to find anyone under the age of 30 who’s even heard of Diff’rent Strokes. Replacing him would require a ground-up rewrite, but leaving him in only emphasises just how out-of-time this material now feels.

It’s not just the references that have aged, but the show’s whole ethos. Observations about casual racism (“Everyone’s a little bit racist,” they sing, in a song that uses equal-opportunity bigotry to assuage white guilt) feel mired in an understanding of racism that society has mercifully grown beyond. Despite some attempts to soften the egregious offensiveness of characters like Christmas Eve – here, she dresses like a fashionable hipster, sans kimono – or the Muppety siren referred to as Lucy the Slut, there’s no getting around how obnoxious and old-fashioned the show’s attempts at provocation now feel. There is a pervading sense of “you won’t believe they just said that”, but of course, we do believe it – they’ve been saying it for decades.

There is nonetheless much to admire about Avenue Q. The performances in particular are all strong, and involve an impressive juggling of singing, puppetry, and character-switching. The songs are bright and catchy, more pithy than substantial. “Fantasies Come True”, a balladic Act One showstopper, is a particular treat, sending bubbles flying out into an audience in a gimmick that’s really quite magical. The sets look terrific, and the puppets, designed by former Sesame Street puppeteer Rick Lyon, remain a marvel. Jason Moore returns to direct the show he’s directed several times down the years, and this generally seems a confident, well-oiled machine.

Yet this slickness isn’t enough for Avenue Q to justify itself. Why is this show being revived today? I’m not sure there’s a good answer for this. It’s a bit like an old Nineties TV show that’s been hastily upscaled to HD – the harsher, high-res scrutiny calls attention to all sorts of wrinkles and rebarbative crevices that might have previously gone unnoticed. It’s a time capsule, sure – but maybe one better left buried.

‘Avenue Q’ is at the Shaftesbury Theatre until 29 August