Twenty years ago, the “bonkers-yet-ingenious” “Avenue Q” – a sort of “‘Sesame Street’ for adults”, mixing cute puppets with jaw-droppingly offensive comic songs – “romped into the West End”, having triumphed on Broadway, said Marianka Swain in The Telegraph. For this revival it has been tweaked a bit, to incorporate references to Netflix, AI and OnlyFans. But – happily – not “one ounce of the show’s gleefully outrageous humour” has been sacrificed in the process.
The tongue-in-cheek trigger warning – “contains puppet nudity” – doesn’t begin to cover it, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. There are also puppets having sex, and joining in joyfully bad-taste songs such as “If You Were Gay”, “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” and “The Internet Is for Porn” – the last led by Trekkie Monster, a puppet that exudes “Cookie Monster-turns-dirty vibes”. It’s all delightfully subversive, and extremely funny.
The show is rude, but “more full of heart than snarl”, agreed Dominic Maxwell in The Times. Songwriters Robert Lopez (“The Book of Mormon”, “Frozen”) and Jeff Marx convey the anxieties faced by youngsters entering the adult world in songs such as “What Do You Do with a BA in English”; and in the bad-taste ones, they “smartly, catchily” endorse neither nastiness nor self-righteousness. Their message – which is arguably even more relevant now than 20 years ago – is that life is “more complicated than that”.
There’s much to enjoy here, including pin-sharp performances, said Louis Chilton in The Independent. But parts of the show felt dated to me. “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” seems rooted in “an understanding of racism that society has mercifully grown beyond”. Younger audiences will not understand the reference to Gary Coleman, a child star from the 1980s who died in 2010. Yes, some of it has aged badly, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times. But it’s still a treat. “Avenue Q” is a “fundamentally big-hearted show” with a message to “hang on in there” – and this revival is packed with the same combination of “silly, sweet and saucy comedy that bagged it a fistful of awards in the Noughties”.
Shaftesbury Theatre, London WC2. Until 29 August
‘Big-hearted’ revival returns to the West End with more ‘saucy comedy’
