The musical-theater industry is a deeply uncool, narrow, corporate-tasting, whimsy-based segment of the general culture. At least it was. According to Ben Brantley, writing on the front page of New York Times' most recent Week in Review section (a section not usually given over to theater-related think pieces): "The word is that Broadway got hip this year." The biggest show on Broadway this year—the one at the center of a gorgeous storm of critical approbation, the one that won seven Tony Awards last Sunday night—was a musical. A 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, no less: the revival of South Pacific. The director, Bartlett Sher, who lives in Seattle and is the artistic director of Intiman Theatre, had a kind of Stephen Malkmus/Daniel Day-Lewis/ Al Pacino cool upon accepting his directing award. Frank Rich, the political columnist, wrote in his Memorial Day weekend column that "audiences are ambushed by the revival. They expect corn, but in a year when war and race are at center stage in the national conversation, this relic turns out to have a great deal to say." Even the old hipsters at the New Yorker are obsessed; Hendrick Hertzberg was so moved by South Pacific that he wrung out some of its national-conversation meaning on his blog: "Those two adorable, latte-colored children are like a pair of Barack Obamas...."
Too bad South Pacific is in New York and not, say, here. Musicals as they are when they're staged in Seattle—the big touring shows, 5th Avenue Theatre's big locally produced shows, the smaller Village Theater–type shows—never seem related to the world we live in and, the vast majority of the time, are long/purposeless/phoned in. I stopped defending musicals years ago and I kinda sorta stopped going to them. I never took an interest in Avenue Q when it opened off-Broadway in 2003, even after it won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2004 (what was its competition? Wicked?). And last Tuesday at work, when Brendan Kiley asked if I still wanted to go to Avenue Q with him that night, I thought of all the musicals I've sat through in Seattle and almost made up an excuse and backed out.
Good thing I didn't back out. Avenue Q, it turns out, is a splendid thing—a little long, yes, but well-written and smart and slightly funnier than the promotional posters of Muppet-ish cleavage suggest, because its funniness arises out of very real characters. For being puppets, the puppet characters aren't all that puppet-y; like Sesame Street, Avenue Q is a mix of puppets and actors, but unlike Sesame Street, the puppeteers are visible, too, giving some characters three surface dimensions: the puppet, the person controlling the puppet, and the shadow they both cast. Unlike Sesame Street, the subject matter includes the fuckedness of being a closeted gay Republican (poor guy has to say things like "I can't wait to eat her pussy again!"), the fuckedness of childhood celebrity (Gary Coleman is a character), how fucked you are if you get an English degree, the politics of hetero fucking on a first date, the deliciousness of beer, the wonderfulness of porn, and racism.
The enduring musicals, the ones that seem undefeated, draw historical place/time portraits—of post–Weimar Era Germany (Cabaret), of hippies in America in the 1960s (Hair), of Edwardian London's warring classes (My Fair Lady), of the South Pacific islands during World War II (South Pacific), of the AIDS-ravaged East Village of the early 1990s (Rent). Avenue Q belongs in this company, only the place/time it captures is our own. It's a portrait of the present, full of the colloquialisms and mores and cultural references of millennial twenty- and thirtysomethings; there are even flat screens (so millennial!) that descend from the rafters to help tell the story. As for the race thread: Some of the puppets are "monsters," which is akin to a race, and some aren't, although the audience can't see the difference, and the one explicit sex scene is a monster and a nonmonster getting it on. The race number (there's a race number!) is called "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" and seems expressly written for an audience preoccupied with the question of whether Barack Obama is really going to make it in November, even though Avenue Q debuted the year before Obama's career-changing Democratic Convention speech in 2004.
I left thinking that I should see more musicals. 
