Amid news that the Avenue Q tour will be hunkering down in Chicago for the first time, I’ve been harkening back to what a joy it was to see the show (twice in one week) after it had just opened. Loved it! A framed poster of Rod proclaiming he is not a closeted homowhatever hangs with pride over our kitchen sink. 

Why I love this show: 

It’s irreverent. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all in for a night of splashy escapist spectacle if that’s what’s on the menu, but shows like Avenue Q, [title of show], or Dame Edna that keep me just on the edge of uncomfortable (while at the same time cracking me up) are theatre experiences that really stick with me for the long haul. 

It’s way gay. I know it’s not the authors’ intentions, but I like to claim the Q in the title for the Queer side. SMALL SPOILER ALERT: In the scene where Rod realizes that Nickie’s profession of love for him is just a dream, there was a collective “awwww….” (not in an annoying way, but in a poignant way) from the audience. There aren’t a lot of times when I have experienced that sort of palpable empathy for the unrequited longings of a closeted gay puppet. Well, I guess that’s the only time I’ve experienced it, but it was nice.

It’s universal. To some degree, it sucks to be all of us, and to spend an evening collectively reveling in that despair is somehow refreshing. As the composers, Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez say in this NPR interview, college is like this fantasy time, when we are convinced we can conquer the world. Many of us follow the path of the Avenue Q gang, from “What Can You Do with a B.A. in English,” to “It Sucks to be Me,” to “I Wish I Could Go Back to College,” finally finding solace that “It’s Only for Now.”

I was disappointed to hear that Avenue Q wasn’t going to tour originally, but was going to mounted (so to speak) in Las Vegas. That Vegas run has come and gone (after only a nine month run).

In the mean time a London production has been running at the Noel Coward Theatre, since June of 2006. Some interesting adjustments were originally made to adjust to pop-culture differences across the pond. Fearing that Londoners wouldn’t be familiar with Different Strokes, Gary Coleman became just “Gary,” and his line “Try havin’ people stopping you and saying ‘What you talkin’ about, Willis,’” became “Try havin’ people stopping you and saying ‘I thought you was dead!’” Eventually though, both the character name and the catch phrase were reinstated. So anyways, I’m glad that the irreverent world of Avenue Q will traverse outside of NYC, LV and London. If its popularity in New York is any indication, it should fair well with the theatre going public across the nation. Hopefully the lives of theatergoers from San Diego to Minneapolis to Chicago to San Francisco suck enough to allow them to revel in it with the puppets.

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