strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
« study break | Main | adventures in pseudoglamour »
Feb 21 03: theatre corner!
Sari and John and Paul and I did a shockingly NYC thing this evening. We went to see a show. And not just any show: we saw a musical currently in previews in a tiny little theatre just off Union Square. The show is called Avenue Q—after a real street, way out in Brooklyn—and if there is any justice at all it will be the next Little Show Turned Runaway Hit. It’s about twenty- and thirty-somethings trying to find their place in a world full of sex and bad jobs and star-crossed relationships and frustrated dreams. Oh, and two-thirds of the ensemble are puppets.
The seven-person cast is great. Three of them play ‘real’ people (including none other than Gary Coleman); the rest handle the puppets. They sing. They dance. They turn on a dime from hilarious to heart-rending. The puppeteers display fabulous technical skill, and easily hold their own against their ‘real’ castmates. The non-puppeteer actors have much easier jobs, because they all play one character each. Did I mention that one of the characters is Gary Coleman? And another character is a Japanese immigrant social worker who is apparently also Judy Garland back from the dead? Among them, they get married, break one another’s hearts, come out of the closet, fall in love, sleep with the wrong people, seek their true purposes in life, surf Internet porn, become washed-up child-actor has-beens by the age of fifteen, and succumb to (or resist) the charms of those snuggly Bad Idea Bears. Actually, there were several points in the show where Sari and I looked at each other and realized that the characters’ stories were uncomfortably like our own. We threatened to make a break for the door so we could have a good cry on the street, but we didn’t mean it. We were having too much fun to leave.
Clearly, this is a show that needs to be seen to be fully appreciated. It can go from Sesame Street homage to parody in a heartbeat. (They’ve even got a pair of TV monitors to provide little ‘educational’ video clips.) The songs are stylistically varied but uniformly catchy, and Paul will happily rave about the fabulous arrangements for the three-man orchestra if you ask him to. The production design is low-rent but exuberant and inventive: the three-building-facades backdrop unfolds in clever ways to provide necessary interiors, but it’s never so clever that it upstages the show. The puppets have the simple, expressive elegance of the house of Henson, which makes it all the more unsettling when you see them having sex. (Which is not to say that Avenue Q is tawdry or seeks to be shocking for shock’s sake, but this show is not for kids.) There were a few sound glitches, and the follow spot didn’t always follow closely enough, but hey, it’s in previews.
So you’d best get your tickets now, before the reviews come out. Ere long every hipster in town is going to be lining up for a puppet show.