A Utah Theater Review by Ben Christensen
Back in 2007, a friend introduced me to a handful of songs from the Broadway cast recording of Avenue Q, including “If You Were Gay” and “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist.” The songs were catchy, clever, and downright hilarious. I’ve been dying to see the show since then, but the stars have not aligned until now. I’m sure you can see how this put the cast and crew of Midvale Main Street Theatre’s Avenue Q in an awkward position: with six years of very high expectations to be fulfilled, either I was going to love this show or I was going to be severely disappointed. Spoiler alert: I loved it.
Avenue Q is an adult-themed spoof of Sesame Street about a group of puppets and humans living in an apartment building managed by former child star Gary Coleman in New York City. The show maintains a similar feel to the children’s program it’s parodying, except that the upbeat songs are about how it sucks to be thirty-two and unemployed, the educational blurbs are about one-night stands, and the puppets have foul mouths. The Midvale Main Street production embraces these contradictions, creating a show that is at once raunchy and heart-warming.
One of the big challenges of using puppets onstage is that the audience is never quite sure whether to focus attention on the puppets themselves or on the actors controlling them. Midvale Main Street does their best to put attention on the puppets by having the actors dress in simple black costumes, but I still found myself looking to the actors, whose faces are much more expressive than those of the puppets, particularly in the cases of Kate Monster (Liz Hilst) and Rod (Ryan Throckmorton Fallis). Perhaps because of the puppet’s more pliable construction or perhaps due to more skilled puppetry on the part of Garrett Grigg, I found Trekkie Monster’s face to be the most expressive of the puppets. Ashlee Brereton actually wears a sexy black dress appropriate for her character, Lucy the Slut, which worked for me—I couldn’t help noticing the actors behind the puppets anyway, so they might as well be dressed to match their characters. All the actors provide great voices for their puppets, but I was especially impressed by JJ Bateman’s Nicky, whose voice is eerily similar to the Sesame Street character he’s meant to parody. Chase Ewell does a good job of portraying Princeton’s progression from wide-eyed optimist to experienced realist. Rounding out the puppet cast are Michael Anthony Howell as New Comer and Sean McLaughlin and Kristina Stone as the Bad Idea Bears, each of whom contribute to the themes and tone of the show.
In addition to the puppets, there are three human characters. Ryan Hoskins is cast well as the aspiring comedian, Brian. The most questionable casting choices are of Lisa Grow as Christmas Eve and Taylor Lawrence as Gary Coleman, only because they are two white women playing a Japanese woman and a black man, respectively. This works better in the case of Christmas Eve because she’s written as a comedic stereotype with a thick Asian accent, mixing up her “l”s and “r”s, and Grow delivers this masterfully. With Lawrence as Gary Coleman, it’s a little more offputting—the production may be willing to keep a joke about Coleman marching slowly toward his death that is in much poorer taste now that he’s dead than it was when the script was written, but in 2013 (thankfully) no one is going to put a white actor in blackface on stage, which means that the actress has to constantly remind the audience through dialogue that she is actually a black man, which is jarring each time. There’s no question that Lawrence is a talented actress, though, and if anything this dissonance only adds to the show’s overarching themes of race and identity, forcing the audience to question our own racist assumptions just as the characters do.
As we’ve mentioned before in previous reviews, Midvale Main Street’s stage is a small one, and again with Avenue Q they’ve shown they know how to use their space well. The set is the front of a two-story apartment building, with six windows for characters to pop out of, creating the illusion of a much larger space. This set stays in the background throughout the production, even in scenes that take place inside the building or elsewhere, with pantomime and/or smaller set pieces establishing the other settings. A TV screen complements the stage with occasional Sesame Street-like educational blurbs, and the sound was almost perfect, with only a few brief microphone glitches.
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I went into Midvale Main Street’s Avenue Q with unreasonably high expectations and was happy to see my expectations fulfilled. I laughed at the dirty jokes and provocative lyrics, my heart went out to Kate Monster and Rod as each struggled through the ups and downs of love and sex, and I felt inspired by the show’s uplifting conclusion. Avenue Q plays for two more weeks, through June 15th, and I will definitely be going to see it again. I will also be sure to bring a few dollars to give when the characters come out to the audience collecting donations for the Utah AIDS Foundation. I highly recommend you do the same.
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