Musical Review: Avenue Q

It's been an awfully long time, all you people out there who don't follow my blog. I have to apologize for the wait, but over the next week or so I'm going to put up the three reviews of the musicals I saw recently, and maybe even a decent article or something.

In December, I went to Avenue Q with my roommate at the Lied Center. It was the traveling Broadway company that I saw, so it should be pretty representative of the real thing. My only difficulty watching was that it was a little quiet from where I was sitting. Anyway, on to the review:

Plot: 18/20
The plot of Avenue Q was probably one of the weaker points of the show. The whole first act was built up of small vignettes, all entertaining of course. But when I went out for intermission, I was questioning myself about what had REALLY happened in all the time. It just seemed like song after song to try to get all the humor out to keep the audience interested. The second act did manage to wrap everything up pretty well, but it almost seemed like I was watching two separate musicals that just happened to share characters. Still, it was easy to follow and there wasn't any point where I was saying "This should go".

Characters: 12/15
Maybe this was just a frustration of my expectations, but the regular people sort of took away from the whole puppet thing. I don't know. A lot of the characters seemed really 1-Dimensional and sometimes downright annoying, which I know was part of the intent, but I wanted to shoot Christmas Eve from the second she opened her mouth. Gary Coleman is about ten years away from being culturally irrelevant too. Most of the characters were fine, but I just felt like they were given vices in order to make songs about said vices.

Dialogue: 13/15
The dialogue was very clever throughout, with cultural references, double entendres, and things of that nature. And even with that it still managed to seem very realistic. It loses two points, though, for the completely unnecessarily overblown accents. Some characters were hard to understand, and I don't think that was due to bad acting as much as preference.

Music: 18/20
I was slightly disappointed in the orchestration of the pit. It almost got into the realm of piano/bass/guitar/drums, which is always undesirable to me. Most of the songs were great and pretty memorable. That's even outside the two that everyone knows and beats to death. All of the lyrics were clever and I was laughing through most of the songs. There were still a few diamonds in the rough (Typically, if a song lasts less than a minute, it could have been cut)

Adaptation: 10/10
This is in some ways an adaptation of Sesame Street, but was extremely clever in that regard, so it gets full adaptation points.

Curtain Call: 4/5
I can't for the life of me remember how the curtain call went, but I feel like I remember complaining about it. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt though.

Theme/Underlying Social Message: 6/7
This was your run-of-the-mill standard theme of following your dreams and stuff like that, but it seemed down to Earth and realistic (mostly), so it didn't feel as cliche and contrived as other shows I have seen in the past. Still nothing spectacular, but nothing really needing to be punished.

Other Opinion Category: 5/8
One thing that I unfortunately have to mark down Avenue Q for is how patently offensive it is. I enjoyed every bit of it, but when I objectively look at it, I realize that twenty years down the line it won't hold the same magic for me as it did when I saw it originally. Musicals should be able to stand the test of time, and I'm not sure if Avenue Q has that capability. It seems a little gimmicky, just for the fact that it's all built on the whole "Sesame street for Adults" concept. It just sort of seems like an "...On Ice" sort of thing.

Total: 86/100

I really enjoyed the show, don't get me wrong, I just would say the writing and music merits of it aren't as strong as other shows, and that's what this blog is about, not about how much fun you'll have.