An illicit, profane, puppet joy

What an illicit joy this profane, Tony award-winning musical spoof of Sesame Street proves to be, two decades after it first hit the West End.

As in Jim Henson’s educational TV institution, puppets and human characters interact and learn together in a fictional New York neighbourhood.

Here though the subject matter isn’t spelling, maths and basic politeness but racism, sex and the shattering of youthful dreams.

It’s both hilarious and liberating to see goggle-eyed, gape-grinning puppets drinking, swearing and shagging.

The pitch-perfect, genre-mocking songs (Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx) and the book (Jeff Whitty) gleefully demolish taboos in a way that should leave the “you-can’t say-anything-these-days” crowd sputtering over their keyboards.

The numbers Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist, Schadenfreude and the closing For Now are standouts.

Lopez went on to co-create Book of Mormon and co-write the songs in the Frozen movies, while Mark has penned songs for Scrubs and Glee: astonishingly Avenue Q was the first completed work for both.

This revival by the original Broadway director, Jason Moore, becomes a layered, elegant dance between the puppets and their visible, all-singing operators, who often mirror or undercut their charges’ reactions.

The sets, by Anna Louizos, are cartoonish evocations of New York stoops, the Empire State Building and rat-strewn Times Square, augmented by onscreen pastiches of basic educational animation: a graphic of “five night stands” is reduced to “one night stand” before two puppets are discovered in bed.

True, the show has dated somewhat despite injected references to ChatGPT and Donald Trump.

But it remains surprisingly wholesome and hopeful despite the willfully offensive lyrics and the poor life choices that the fleshy, furry and felt-faced characters make.

Above all, it’s laugh-out-loud funny.

I remember having a sense of humour failure at the original West End production.

F***ing hell, what was wrong with me?

At the heart of Avenue Q are three love stories.

Or four, if you count the addiction of shaggy, red-eyed Trekkie Monster to online porn, which is as gruff and me-pronoun-monomaniacal as Cookie Monster’s for cookies.

Armed with an English degree, preppy Princeton (voiced and mostly operated by fresh-faced Noah Harrison) moves to Avenue Q and tries to find his purpose in life.

But he must also choose between good-hearted teaching assistant Kate Monster and the aptly named cabaret artiste Lucy the Slut, who is the only puppet with (fishnet-clad, usually akimbo) legs and whose appearances are heralded by a tsk-ing hi-hat.

Both characters are incarnated with panache by Emily Benjamin.

Meanwhile, among the humans, Jewish would-be comedian Brian and his termagant, outrageously-accented Japanese therapist wife Christmas Eve (her love song is titled “The More You Ruv Someone”) struggle to find romantic equilibrium.

And puppet room-mates Rod (Harrison again) and Nicky (Charlie McCullagh) make explicit the oft-inferred sexuality of Sesame Street’s lookalike couple Bert and Ernie, with Nicky trying to crowbar Rod out of the closet while insisting that he himself is absolutely not gay.

McCullagh also plays Trekkie Monster and one of the cuddly but wild-eyed Bad Idea Bears, who periodically appear to cheerfully suggest substance abuse or suicide.

One of the pleasures of the show is occasionally noticing how a puppet has been juggled to another operator or a voice has been “cast” from offstage, or how Harrison, Benjamin and McCullagh interact with the alter-egos they’re manipulating.

But you can also just get captivated by the puppets, who mostly consist of one or two human-animated arms and a melon-shaped face, but who – like Henson’s – are remarkably expressive.

More so than the wholly human characters, actually, though Amelia Kinu Muus tackles the crudely stereotyped Christmas Day with gusto.

The idea that the neighbourhood’s handyman is Gary Coleman - the growth-limited child star of 80s sitcom Diff’rent Strokes, who was ripped off by his parents and died in 2010 – is the part of the show that has dated the worst.

He’s clownishly played here by Dionne Ward-Anderson.

I suspect this revival will appeal primarily to those who saw Avenue Q first time round, or who have consumed the superb soundtrack and considered the show “lost” for two decades in London.

But even those coming to it fresh should relish a work that treats its naïve characters and its subject matter with outrageous, pin-sharp bad taste but also with affection and compassion.

Booking to 29 Aug, avenueqmusical.co.uk .