Porn-obsessed puppets, casual racism and broken dreams… Mike White takes a mosey down ‘Avenue Q’.

“Sometimes people think ‘Ooh puppets – I’ll take the kids!’ but ‘Avenue Q’ really isn’t a young children’s show,” says Evan Ensign with a fruity chuckle. The mischievous, muppety musical’s associate director has previously worked on ‘Rent’ and ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’, so he knows a thing or two about musicals with a bit of bite. After Broadway, Vegas, a Tony Award win and five hugely successful years in the West End, the show begins its UK tour in Bath this week.

This is ‘puppets for adults’ with a difference. Whereas ‘Spitting Image’’s rubbery stars looked twisted, grotesque and decidedly grown-up, ‘Avenue Q’’s puppeteers stuff their arms up creations that are altogether more fluffy. Their similarity to ‘Sesame Street’ characters is no accident, but instead of Cookie Monster, we have Trekkie Monster, and he’s much more interested in the XXX-rated excesses of the internet than with biscuits. Instead of Bert and Ernie we get roommates Rod and Nicky – but they go one further when (as we always kinda hoped Bert and/or Ernie would, didn’t we?) one of them actually comes out as gay. What with all the colourful characters around, there’s plenty of fun to be had with racism, too – culminating in the friendly, funny-cos-it’s-true singalong ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist’.

Despite giving such child-friendly characters some pretty adult themes, there’s never been an outraged-conservative backlash – certainly nothing like the ludicrous picketing that dogged the Springer opera. “The only time we’ve ever got an adverse reaction is when people haven’t read the parental guidance warning and brought very young children, and they’ve been… quite surprised,” says Evan. More fruity chuckling. But despite the racism/porn/homosexuality headline grabbers, ‘Avenue Q’ remains a very light-hearted, upbeat show. It notably ignores religion (although there was a one-off special called ‘Avenue Jew’) and – unusually for a run-down New York street – no-one even mentions drugs. “The show wasn’t designed to create controversy in that way,” says Evan. “It’s more saying that, whatever our childhoods were like, here are things that suddenly we do end up confronting when we’re adults. How would they be confronted if we were still kids? Religion can be very polarising, and ‘Avenue Q’ is not about polarisation, it’s actually about coming together as a community and finding love, and all the things that human beings go through when they’re adults. There’s still very much an innocence to ‘Avenue Q’, and I think that even in contemporary society, sex has gained a certain innocence again. There’s fear and there’s abstinence and all those things that come up in today’s day and age, but ‘Avenue Q’ doesn’t get into the politics of sex, it just gets into the deed.” It does indeed – full-puppet nudity alert – with some steamy fur-on-fur action (more about that later).

Guiding the cast’s human handlers is puppet trainer Nigel Plaskitt, whose CV includes work on ‘Labyrinth’, ‘Spitting Image’ and several years with ‘Sesame Street International’, setting up shows across Europe. The set-up’s straighforward enough – the furry folk being “very simple glove puppets, very much based on ‘Sesame Street’ and The Muppets.” They’re operated with the actors on stage in full view of the audience – it takes a bit of ‘tuning in’ as you watch. “The idea is that your eyes move between puppeteer and puppet without you really noticing it,” says Nigel. “You probably spend more time looking at the puppets, because your focus is pulled towards their large eyes – and, of course, if the puppeteer is doing their job right, they won’t be doing too much to draw attention away from the puppet.” Enough of the logistics, let’s get back to that sex scene. “That did require some interesting rehearsals, because obviously we’ve had to talk through all the positions in detail, and decide whether they’re going at it with sufficient gusto. All the movement comes from the arm of the puppeteer, and sometimes they’re not as vigorous as they should be, in order to allow the whole audience to see what’s going on. So we have to be pretty matter-of-fact about it. But you soon learn that in ‘Avenue Q’, you forget about the niceties of polite society.”

The niceties may be forgotten, everyone may be (a bit) racist, there may be a big monster leaning out of a window bellowing “porn!”, but Evan’s keen to emphasise that underneath “it’s about acceptance, it’s about caring, it’s about how communities can come together, and that shouldn’t be based on what race you are, or your sexual preference. None of that can define who a person is in this community because people in this community are also sometimes blue puppets, or pink puppets, or green puppets.” It’s not really as edgy as people make out, is it? “I personally have a sarcastic sense of humour and I sometimes have to fight that in terms of ‘Avenue Q’, because it comes from a much more innocent place. And I know it sounds so contradictory to say ‘Avenue Q’ is innocent but it is, because it just says ‘These things are happening, you can like it or not like it but you have to acknowledge that they’re happening. It’s there. So let’s accept that it’s there, and then learn how we’re supposed to deal with that.” Ideally, Venue suggests, through the medium of song?

“Yes! Well, if we all walked around the world singing at each other instead of yelling we’d probably be in a much better place. We’d all be walking around having our internal monologues out external; it’d be a confusing world but we’d know where we stand a little better.”

The opening song, ‘It Sucks to Be Me’ – about the coming-of-age realisation that basically most of us aren’t all that special, and that most of us dislike our lives much of the time – introduces a theme central to ‘Avenue Q’. Evan again: “At some point or other we all feel like that. You have to know the lows to understand the highs. Heartbreak, feeling like a failure, these are things that just everybody experiences. We have our bad ’n’ nasty moments, we have our slightly slutty moments, we have our ‘I don’t wanna talk about anything’ moments. We have our Bad Idea Bear moments where something in your brain is going, ‘I know I shouldn’t do this but it sounds like fun and I’m going to do it anyway’.” (Appropriately, the Bad Idea Bears end up embracing Scientology). “I think that’s one of the reasons the show has been the success that it has is, because it touches honestly on things that we all relate to, whether it’s a human being talking about it, or a sex-crazed puppet.”

AVENUE Q THEATRE ROYAL BATH, 2-12 FEB AND BRISTOL HIPPODROME, 24-28 MAY. FFI: WWW.AVENUEQTHEMUSICAL.CO.UK FOR REVIEW CLICK HERE.
 

Copyright Mike White 2011

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