Puppets, singing and … sex? Think Sesame Street for adults and you’ve got the general concept of the award-winning Broadway musical Avenue Q. Currently on a national tour, Avenue Q stops at the National Theatre – starting tomorrow – to enlighten adults about homosexuality, racism, alcoholism and sex.
Through puppet song and dialogue, Avenue Q follows Princeton, a college graduate who has recently moved to New York City. He finds himself at Avenue Q, the only neighborhood he can afford to live in. With his new neighbors and friends, Princeton struggles to survive in New York and to find a job, all while learning essential life lessons.
To date, the musical has won three Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Original Score and Best Book. Avenue Q has also become one of the longest-running productions still on Broadway, has dozens of clips on YouTube and is quickly garnering national attention.
Conceived by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, Avenue Q pays homage to Sesame Street and other children’s workshop shows that many of our generation, as well as our parents, grew up on.
In fact, many of the characters are modeled after other classic staples of children’s television. Rod and Nicky, two of Princeton’s neighbors, are parodies of Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street. Trekkie Monster is much like Cookie Monster, only instead of having an innocent penchant for cookies, he has an addiction to porn.
David Benoit, a longtime Broadway veteran, plays Nicky, Trekkie Monster and one of the Bad Idea Bears, a duo whose goal is to instill bad ideas in others. Benoit was touring with the Broadway company for Les Miserablés when he was asked to audition for the Las Vegas cast of Avenue Q; he performed there for a number of years before moving to the national touring cast.
After being cast, Benoit, along with his castmates, went through “intensive puppet camp” to learn the basics of puppeteering, an experience he called “amazing and pretty humbling.” Even after years as a puppeteer for Avenue Q, Benoit still believes he has a lot to learn about the intricacies of this difficult art form.
Rick Lyon, who worked on Sesame Street as one of the puppeteers for Big Bird, played Benoit’s roles in the original production. Benoit credits Lyons’ expertise as just one of the reasons for the cast’s success in having a smooth show with seamless choreography.
The most unique aspect of Avenue Q’s puppeteering is that the cast is actually onstage with the puppets. The puppets move in tandem with the actors, who provide the movement and the voice for the characters.
“The audience, when watching us at first, will probably want to watch the actors first,” Benoit said. “Then, 10 minutes in the show, they’ll start projecting our emotions onto the puppets. … It’s sort of like watching a foreign movie when you watch the subtitles and transpose it into the movie.”
Through its humorous writing and outrageous songs, Benoit said Avenue Q “pushes the envelope, and no one has ever seen anything like it before.” The musical’s genius lies in its simplicity – though Avenue Q has no real target audience, the humor is fitting for college students and older demographics, with its full-fledged puppet nudity and puppet sex.
“The humor is right up the college alley,” Benoit said. “We have older folks who find themselves laughing in spite of themselves … and other people who just came for the humor are taken aback at [how smart] the writing is.”
Though Avenue Q is making headlines for its provocative story lines, Benoit insists controversy is just the tip of the iceberg. The real heart of the story lies within the musician’s lessons of openness and understanding.
“It appeals to anyone over the age of 13 who has a sense of humor and has experience with life,” Benoit said. “I could promise you that no one has ever seen anything like this, and you will laugh a lot. It has a good heart.”
dnhan@umd.edu
