AVENUE Q, Broadway's smash-hit 2004 Tony Award-winner for Best Musical, Best Score and Best Book, recently launched a yearlong national tour in San Diego. Filled with witty and unconventional songs including “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?,” “It Sucks To Be Me” and “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist,” AVENUE Q is about trying to make it in New York City with big dreams and a tiny bank account. However, what makes this show particularly unique is that the cast is cleverly comprised of people – and puppets.

Jeff Marx, the lyricist who co-wrote AVENUE Q with Robert Lopez, did not initially set out to write a Broadway musical. Rather, they decided they would write a musical Muppet movie to pitch to the Jim Henson Company. “We decided to write something for puppets because they have an inherent permission to sing just because they’re so fanciful and they’re already fake and you’re already rooting for them and you already believe in them that they’re real – why shouldn’t they sing?,” Marx asks. When they heard back with a “Thanks, but no thanks” they decided to create their own puppets for a possible adult television show. They envisioned that it would be “a Sesame Street take-off; a parody.” So they set to work trying to create their own puppet characters that would be contemporary and funny. “We based them on ourselves and our friends living in Queens and Brooklyn, just having gotten out of college trying to get along without our parents money, dealing with breakups, dealing with coming out of the closet, dealing with racism and getting out of your apartment more and that kind of thing,” he explains. “So we thought let’s write out a show about our lives and our friend’s lives in this period where we’re trying to find our way and let’s tackle every problem in life that could be funny and at the end say to everyone who’s watching ‘You’re going to be all-right. Life may suck now or you may think it sucks now, but you’ll be ok.’”

After numerous sketches until they both agreed on the puppets, they had Rick Lyon create some prototypes and decided to have a reading to pitch it to the television networks. “We faxed Comedy Central and HBO and FOX and everyone we could and of course none of them came,” Marx says. “The only people that came were theatre people. And we invited the public – we posted it on the internet and said ‘Free admission, come tell us what you think and bring anyone you know from TV.’ It filled up so fast we had to do four performances of it.” Jeffrey Seller, a producer of the Broadway show RENT, attended the first performance (a reading) and approached Marx and Lopez afterward. He thought the material was great and expressed interest in producing the show. “So Bobby and I looked at each other and we went ‘Okay, let’s do it as a theatre piece!’ When the producer of RENT says ‘I want to produce your show,’ you’d have to be a fool to think about it.” The show began Off-Broadway in March, 2003 and received solid reviews and strong attendance that led to its move to Broadway that July. It earned its three Tony Awards the following year.

The charm and unique nature of AVENUE Q is not something that can easily be described. “The best way we can communicate about it is to tell a person to ask someone who has seen it because usually peoples’ enthusiasm about it speaks way more strongly,” Marx explains. “Rather than saying, ‘It has puppets but it’s not really a puppet show. And they have adults. It’s grown up.’ None of these things really describe how funny and heartwarming and true and inspiring it is.” Audiences should know that even though puppets are typically kid-friendly, this show is not meant for children. It’s recommended for ages 13 and up and the advertising materials bear the warning: "Full puppet nudity, not suitable for children.”

With all the success the show has had on Broadway, doing well on the road can be more difficult as other shows have discovered. “The unfortunate thing is that when you get to a city and you sit down for weeks on end, by the time the word-of-mouth really spreads and people tell their friends, ‘You’ve got to see it,’ that kind of thing is slow. When you’re on Broadway you have time to build but on tour, you turn around and it’s moved on to the next city.” But Marx is optimistic considering the success the show has had so far. “We never knew any step of the way how it was going to go,” he explains. “We always just kind of hoped for the best. Everything in it is funny but absolutely based on truth. We just hoped that people would be like us and like what we liked.”

By: Beth Cox