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. 
