Avenue Q evaluate – provocative puppets return for a feast of filth and enjoyable | Theatre

The set off warning “puppet nudity” doesn’t start to cowl it. You can even see puppets having intercourse, singing about being “a little bit racist” and gleefully proudly owning as much as their predilections for porn.

Avenue Q’s cute subversiveness is again, 20 years after these fuzzy-felt Sesame Street wannabes took the West End by storm. Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx’s Tony award-winning musical just isn’t precisely stunning now nevertheless it’s very amusing as these creatures (plus some people) fall in love, have existential crises and create merry havoc.

Directed by Jason Moore on Anna Louizos’s house-lined set, as flat as a baby’s drawing, it kicks off with the arrival of bushy-tailed faculty graduate Princeton (Noah Harrison) on the titular New York avenue, and leads into his romance with Kate Monster (a Shrek-like outsider performed by Emily Benjamin) and his seek for life’s better which means. His new neighbours embrace plain-speaking Japanese therapist Christmas Eve (Amelia Kinu Muus), former little one star turned handyman Gary (Dionne Ward-Anderson), and Rod (additionally Harrison) and Nicky (Charlie McCullagh) – flatmates within the mould of Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie.

There is a noughties naughtiness to songs like If You Were Gay, Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist and The Internet Is for Porn, the final led by Trekkie Monster exuding Cookie Monster-turns-dirty vibes. These songs go all-out to bust taboos and might need sounded explosive again within the day. The subject material remains to be present (from the resurgence of homophobia to the revival of Black Lives Matter), however not as charged in shock worth. The hammy Japanese accent by Austrian-Japanese performer Kinu Muus is probably essentially the most placing factor. There can also be the pre-#MeToo moniker of Lucy (“the slut”), an influencer who appears to be like like a puppet model of Bonnie Blue with a plunging neck-line (“yeah, they’re real”, she coos).

The drive of the present’s faux-naivety works due to the comedian dissonance between the puppets’ innocence – huge eyes, cutesy voices – and their grownup misbehaviour (drunkenness, pole dancing, intercourse and betrayal). Lopez and Marx’s songs are a blast, from the cleverness of Schadenfreude to the melancholy in Kate’s break-up track, There’s a Fine, Fine Line, and the closeted hilarity of Rod singing My Girlfriend, Who Lives in Canada. Every quantity is carried out with such bodily and vocal exuberance by the solid of actor-puppeteers, particularly the spectacular Harrison and Benjamin, that it actually does appear as if the puppets are doing the speaking, singing and shagging.

Puppet designer Rick Lyon’s furry creations are winkingly spinoff (he labored on Sesame Street for 15 seasons). It is a recognisably intelligent riff on the youngsters’s present, with its animation breakouts, preschool instructional classes and Oscar the Grouch’s signature dustbins within the backdrop. But the kooky satire additionally stands by itself phrases. Jeff Whitty’s award-winning e-book has been up to date with jokey mentions of AI, OnlyFans and Spotify, whereas the track Mix Tape has a tongue-in-cheek reference to such an “olden days” phenomenon.

The manufacturing trades off its candy/subversive/manic charms and the story itself just isn’t particularly sturdy. But who cares? It brings such sunny puppet-bound escapism whereas by no means fairly leaving our world and the mess that human beings have created in it. The present ends on a hopeful word with heavy helpings of “this too will pass” spirit. It is all just for now, the puppets inform us – even Trump.