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.
