magicaddict | If, At Any Point...

...you feel that watching donkey-punching muppets is precisely what would make you feel happy, I heartily recommend Avenue Q.

Well, and a therapist, but whatever floats your boat.

I don't think I've ever laughed so much at a live show. It's a truism that so much more can be done with puppets than with people - they can get away with saying and doing things that no person ever could - but the idea has been traded on here and taken to a level I bet Jim Henson wishes he could have gotten away with.

I was hugely impressed with the puppetry. I was curious how the staging (in which humans and puppts interact with eachother, exactly as on Sesame Street) would be handled, and I confess it was rather refreshing to see the audience being asked to do a little work. The puppets end at the torso, their heads controlled by one arm and their arm/s by the other, and their puppeteers (who also provide the voices) are on stage, unhidden and in full view of the audience, who are expected to pretend that they aren't there.

However, this is where it gets intelligent.

The puppeteers never look at each other when their puppets are talking - they, like their puppets, keep their eyes firmly on the other puppet (the exception being where they are controlling a second puppet as well as providing a voice for their first, in which case a second puppeteer controls the first puppet and watches the first puppeteer intently to get the lip synching right). They provide the facial expressions for their puppet, which the audience is expected to translate from the puppeteer's face to the puppet. They also act in the same fashion as their puppet, so there is no distinction between the two. They become invisible by making themselves as indistinguishable from their puppets as they can, and they're absolutely brilliant at it.

As well as being an extremely funny show, with some surprisingly good songs, it's also an education in intelligent staging, and I appreciated it all the more for the work that had gone in to doing it as well as possible. Go watch it - it's worth the money.

All together now (NSFW)...