The Stage

Avenue Q

Published Monday 21 February 2011 at 09:51 by Mark Shenton

There was no musical more biliously funny, appealingly clever or disarmingly self-referential in the first decade of this century than Avenue Q. This musical is about young people, most of them played by puppets, seeking to find their purpose in life.

Rachel Jerram (Kate Monster) in Avenue Q at the Churchill, Bromley Photo: Nick Spratling

The show itself certainly found its moment and its own cause - it moved from off-Broadway to Broadway, where it knocked Wicked off the perch to win the 2004 Tony Award for Best Musical, and then returned to Off-Broadway again, where it continues to thrive. Meanwhile, in the West End it became a peripatetic favourite, refusing to close and playing at three separate theatres over nearly four years.

Now it has hit the touring road in a smart, immaculate recreation of the original production, which is both a virtue but also a slight problem - it isn’t scaled up for the bigger houses it is now playing. The puppets are comparatively tiny, even half way back in the stalls of Bromley’s wide, deep Churchill Theatre, and the young cast manipulating them are sometimes tempted to give big performances to compensate.

Still, there’s no faulting the eager pleasure that delightful Adam Pettigrew, a recent ArtsEd graduate, brings to his joint roles of Princeton and Rod, or the different emotional colours that Rachel Jerram lends to a vulnerable Kate Monster and a brassy Lucy the Slut.

There are also strong contributions from Edward Judge and Jacqueline Tate as the all-human couple and Matthew J Henry as landlord Gary Coleman. The latter character is based on the real-life former child TV star who has, since this show was first written, in fact died. This is one of several references in the show that have been overtaken by history. In the song For Now that ends the show, they used to cite George Bush - now it’s Jedward. But if Avenue Q may not be for “now and forever”, as Cats used to promote itself, it’s definitely still got legs (and lots of fur).