Saturday, November 04, 2006

Avenue Q Is A Bit Fuzzy

Avenue Q won the Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Original Score, and Best Book in 2004. You probably know it as the one with the puppets.

It's about love, relationships, and feelings that occur in an "outerborough" neighborhood of New York City. So far out, in fact, it's on Avenue Q...get it? The time is the present and the story is told mostly on the sidewalk in front of a bunch of row houses.

Here's the thing about the actors and the puppets (think muppets) they use to create the characters. You see, you can SEE the actors. Yes, they stand in clear view with the puppet on one hand and sticks to control the puppet's arms in the other. While the actors are all dressed in gray to fade into the background, their faces are clearly in the foreground of the performance as they use exaggerated facial expressions to convey the character's thoughts and feelings. For example, when the character is happy, both the puppet and the actor have big smiles on their faces. Here's where the play didn't work for me. I just couldn't meld the actor and the puppet into a single entity. I found myself watching the actors vocalizing the songs, speaking the dialog, and controlling the movements of the puppets rather than on the puppets themselves.

At our performance, the male lead took ill about half way through the first act. His stand-in (Howie Michael Smith who was absolutely excellent) stepped in without missing a beat or a note, seamlessly appearing on stage with the lead character's puppet incarnation on his hand. So there was a new lead actor, but there wasn't. There was 1/2 a new lead character. Confused? Yeah, I was too.

Which brings me to another oddity in all of this. The lead female puppet isn't chubby but the actress playing her was. So was the character heavy or not? Now you wouldn't think that would make a difference. And there's where you'd be wrong. More confused? Bear with me. One of her songs takes us into her feelings about being lonely and giving up on the prospects of ever finding love and a boyfriend. I, quite unintentionally, jumped to the conclusion that the puppet was finding it more difficult to find someone special because it was overweight. If a thin actress had played the part it would have been a completely different experience for me.

The acting, music (who could forget The Internet Is For Porn), and production were polished and first rate. The songs' themes carried a New York liberal point of view, similar to my own, but I didn't feel uplifted when I exited the theatre. I'd admit that my overall disappointment with the musical is directly related to my brain's inability to wrap itself around the puppet thing but it isn't up to the audience to do the work. The play's concept and execution left me, well, a bit fuzzy.


The show is playing at the John Golden Theatre. The place is beautiful, relatively small and intimate, and provided a top notch experience.

1 comment:

Breenlantern said...

Wow! I had the exact opposite experience. I was able to absolutely accept that the puppets were alive,and as much as the visible puppeteers should have been distracting and off-setting, they weren't, which fascinated me even more and made it an even better show in my mind.Amazing that we would have such different, almost opposite experiences :-)