Puppets take the non-PC route

AVENUE Q, Lowry, Salford
FOR those of you who didn’t see this often-hilarious musical during its time in London, it’s a sort of Sesame Street as it might have been produced by the naughty boys and girls at the back of the class.

Subverting the educational good-heartedness of the famous TV show, Avenue Q presents similar puppets, but puppets enduring lives of anxiety and ordinariness. This is not the puppet American Dream.

Opening on the arrival in an outer-outer New York borough of Princeton, who wonders how he can change the world with an English degree and doesn’t find an answer, Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx’s smart comedy musical introduces us to Kate Monster, the Bad Ideas Bears, closet gay banker Rod, the porn-addicted Trekkie Monster, Lucy the Slut and more.

Most of these are puppets operated openly by their human performers, but three are actors — including one purporting to be the adult Gary Coleman (the short actor who as a child appeared in comedy series Diff’rent Strokes, and famously had his earnings stolen by his family).

Coleman is the poster boy for the show’s general theme — that the rubbish children are told about being anything they want to be comes back to bite them when they grow into ordinary adults, no better than anyone else. The show’s only concession to the real Coleman’s death last year was to change some of the more obviously tasteless lyrics.

But that’s Avenue Q: honestly, politically incorrect to the point of rudeness, including puppet sex and dummy drunkenness.

And while it falls into the US trap of sentimentalism at the end (and turns its early premise on its head in the process), along the way there are gloriously tasteless numbers, such as Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist, Schadenfreude (pleasure at the misfortune of others) and The Internet is for Porn, all delivered with upbeat tunes and faux-Broadway bounce that has the audience laughing in a way it knows it shouldn’t, but does anyway.

The performances are bright and endearing, both from puppets and humans alike: Rachel Jerram and Adam Pettigrew are good fun as Kate and Princeton, and Matthew J Henry and Jacqueline Tate likewise as humans Gary and Christmas Eve.

And if ultimately the whole thing is a one-joke exercise, it’s a funny one that rarely seems like it.