‘Avenue Q’ is No Place for a Muppet
By Colin Dabkowski
Sometime around 1969, the children of America stole the art form of puppetry away from adults. Or just about.
That year, Jim Henson’s “Sesame Street” took children’s television by storm and served as the genesis of an ongoing empire populated by an oversized bird, a pair of bickering roommates, a moody pig and a frog with a serious inferiority complex.
And for Rochester native and longtime puppeteer Rick Lyon — once an operator of the “Sesame Street” character Big Bird and an employee of Henson’s company — creating the puppets for the hit Broadway musical “Avenue Q” was a way of politely bringing puppetry back into the realm of adults. A tour of the show comes to Shea’s Performing Arts Center tonight.
“Jim’s early work was not for kids,” Lyon said. “It wasn’t even for family audiences. He was an old hippie. He did weird, abstract, bizarre, strange things eating other strange things, stuff blowing up. Children’s television changed the day that ‘Sesame Street’ premiered, and Jim’s life changed, because his life became irrevocably associated with children from that day forward.
“In the rest of his career, he struggled to find ways to break out of that,” including the films “Dark Crystal” and “Labyrinth.” But, Lyon added, Henson never quite regained the avant-garde sensibility that made up his abstract, often darker pre-”Sesame Street” work.
“It was something that he always struggled against and always tried to get away from, and that’s been one of the big joys for ‘Avenue Q’ for me,” Lyon said. “With ‘Avenue Q,’ we’re giving puppetry back to an adult audience.”
The show, which made its Broadway debut to great fanfare in 2003 and won three Tony Awards the following year, features characters that bear close resemblance to many of Henson’s famous Muppets. There’s Rod and Nicky, two roommates constantly at odds with one another (think Bert and Ernie), Trekkie Monster (think Cookie Monster) and several other characters, most in their mid-20s and all searching for their purposes in life on the fictional Avenue Q, a rundown street in an outer borough of New York City. The puppets are operated and voiced by actors who perform in full view and interact with one another directly or through their puppet characters.
For Robert Lopez, who co-wrote the show with Jeff Marx, the idea behind “Avenue Q” was motivated by his own post-collegiate wanderings. Lopez, who grew up in New York City’s Greenwich Village, attended schools for gifted children and finally graduated from Yale University in 1997. He left the rarefied world of higher education with little idea of what he wanted to do with his life.
When, during the first full song in the show, a character named Princeton walks onstage and wonders aloud what he’s supposed to do with a B.A. in English (“Four years of college/and plenty of knowledge/have earned me this useless degree”), the feelings of bewildered college grads everywhere are directly echoed.
“I was one of those kids that was really told they were special and believed it,” Lopez said. “Then for a Yale grad or for anybody, you graduate and the real world descends, you get out and it’s sort of a smack in the face a little bit, because you realize all those professors were only really listening to you because your parents were paying them to.”
Hence the song, “I Wish I Could Go Back to College.” But the show isn’t simply a bunch of middle-class kids whining about their lives (though the most popular song from the show is titled “It Sucks to Be Me”). The show’s puppets and characters also deal, in their light- hearted way, with racism, homosexuality, pornography, depression, homelessness and plenty of other relevant societal issues.
Like “South Park” before it, “Avenue Q” inserts these issues and sometimes inflammatory statements into a kind of irresistible, furry package. Where “South Park” uses clunky animation, “Avenue Q” uses the ubiquity of “Sesame Street” and, as Lyon said, “takes people’s nostalgia and warm feelings about that format and that genre and their associations with puppets and turns it all on its head.”
Hence, when the characters sing the controversial-seeming song “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist,” it doesn’t seem so hard to take from a flapping felt mouth as it might from a live person.
“You don’t have that layer of mistrust that you have when a human is saying something controversial,” Lopez said. “When it’s an interesting-seeming colorful abstraction, a puppet, you’re more open to hearing what the message is and more open to laughing at it.”
Lopez is currently working with “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone on a stage musical and cites the popular cartoon as a major inspiration for the show. He called the 1999 film “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut”"one of the best musicals, period, that has ever been written.”
And for legions of fans of “Avenue Q,” which has penetrated MTV and under-30 pop culture more than any musical since “Rent,” that description could just as well fit Princeton and his pals. And for Lyon, who said many people who have worked on “Sesame Street” over the years have seen and appreciated the show, the success of “Avenue Q” is its repositioning of puppetry for an older audience in a way that’s neither snarky, sophomoric nor insulting to anyone’s intelligence.
“I think Jim would have liked the show,” Lyon said. “Because basically it’s doing what he always wanted to do, but later in his career, he kind of didn’t dare do because he was afraid of offending people if he strayed too far his family image. Hopefully ‘Avenue Q’ has raised the profile of puppetry that’s aimed at adults.”
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“Avenue Q”
Opens at 7:30 tonight in Shea’s Performing Arts Center, 646 Main St., for an eight-performance run that concludes Sunday.
Tickets are $22.50 to $49.50, and more information is available at www.sheas.org or 847-1410.
e-mail: cdabkowski@buffnews.com
Originally published by NEWS ARTS WRITER.
(c) 2008 Buffalo News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.