Returning to the West End to celebrate two decades since those strange muppetty posters went up on London buses, I’m still laughing along with “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”.
Back then, the London Olympics Opening Ceremony, surely the high watermark for progressive optimism in the public domain, was still six years in the future. We could scoff at the swivel-eyed backwoodsmen of UKIP and the likes, immigration barely registering as an issue of concern to voters. It was our world and those obsessives were, as the magnificent finale tells us, only here “For Now”.
But in 2026, I’m still hearing “Everyone’s a little bit racist”, but I’m also, as if a Bad Idea Bear is whispering in my ear at the end of the song’s ultra-catchy chorus I'm also hearing, “...except those who are really very racist indeed and there’s a lot of them and some are in charge of very important things”. Which certainly takes the jauntiness down a notch or two.
Of course, it was my white privilege smiling 20 years ago, and it’s my white privilege smiling now, but sometimes you can grant yourself license to park that intrusive thought and escape to a place where imperfect people and imperfect puppets do imperfect things. But they still rub along and, as they do, things actually get better. So…“Can you tell me how to get, how to get, to Avenue Q?”
Princeton, just graduated with his (self-owned) useless degree in English - big laugh on press night, natch - gets there via Avenues A to P and finally finds a room he can afford at the 16th attempt, with the help of the Bank of Mum and Dad of course. The trust fund kid may not be young, scrappy and hungry, but the neighbourhood is.
Christmas Eve is a therapist who can’t get a client (yep, even in New York) and her fiancé, Brian, is an unemployed stand-up. Rod, a closeted merchant banker, shares a room in the brownstone with straight slacker Nicky, and Trekkie Monster lives on the top floor, a computer mouse in one hand and, well, with his big number titled “The Internet Is For Porn” you can guess what’s in the other. Gary Coleman, that Gary Coleman, is making a much-needed buck as the superintendent (think Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project, with which this show has some earthy parallels).
But Princeton only has eyes for the furry Kate Monster, a teaching assistant who needs a boyfriend with just enough desperation to put off any candidate. She also hopes to open her own school for monsters, a minority bullied in public schools, but there’s no money to make it happen. Those are the two main drivers of Jeff Whitty’s book, not the most original “I Want” plot points for a musical, nor explicitly addressing The Big Issues Of Today, but Whitty knows that he must keep the pace high (children’s telly, the discourse for the production isn’t slow) and that he should get out of the way when the songs come. It’s technically excellent work.
And what songs!
Robert Lopez, uniquely, needs two mantlepieces for his double EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony), that run from this debut to taking in The Book of Mormon and Frozen en route. He shares the credit with old college buddy, Jeff Marx, and, though I tend to scoff at such assertions because I know musical theatre is 99.94% perspiration and only 0.06% inspiration, you can’t help thinking about the fun they had writing those pin sharp music and lyrics.
What registers high on the perspiration meter are the demands placed on the actors. Emily Benjamin (pictured above) squeezes such pathos out of Kate Monster, such yearning and hope, that you can barely believe it’s a puppet who is pulling our heartstrings. She nails the first act closer, “There’s A Fine, Fine Line” like a diva, never mind a muppet. She also voices Lucy The Slut, whose pole dance is indescribable and very much “in the best possible taste” (Kenny Everett fans will know). Whether Ms Benjamin gets double rates, I doubt, but God knows she deserves it!
Keeping up with her is the sweet singing Noah Harrison, catching Princeton’s naive decency mixed with commitment anxiety one moment and doubling to portray Rod’s wrestle with the door to the closet the next. Both are highly skilled puppeteers to boot and, if the legendary sex scene is anything to go by, possess imaginative talents elsewhere too.
The support cast also have a lot of fun, with Amelia Kinu-Muus sounding rather more like the Slovenian Melania Trump than a Japanese-American, but it works. She rocks a wedding dress (Jean Chan’s beautifully observed costumes tell a story on their own) and goes full belt with "The More You Ruv Someone" - a damn near showstopper!
A word too for smiley Gary, the handyman, Dionne Ward-Anderson delivering on a somewhat thankless task as the (likely forgotten) child star of Diff’rent Strokes, and saddled with the funny but somewhat mean number, “Schadenfreude”. Look, we love Gary too!!
Jason Moore is back in the director’s chair, so the handful of updates do not intrude on the show’s unique territory staked out between bad taste and wholesome warmth, any temptation to sanitise the language or soothe millennial sensibilities resisted.
The greatest triumph of this fantastically entertaining show is how its message is as forthright now as it was then, and needed more than ever. If we can accept ourselves for who we are, then we can accept others for who they are too - and vice versa. And every generous act, every withdrawal made on the empathy account, every cautious extension of the benefit of the doubt, makes the world a better place for all of us.
Oh, and reports in the press today valuing Only Fans at $3B suggest that Trekkie Monster wasn’t a bad judge of business after all. I’d just be a bit careful about shaking hands on that deal to fund Kate’s Monstersori school, that’s all.
Add comment