I just got back from New York this very morning, and am about to return there tonight — courtesy, of course, of Avenue Q, the Broadway musical finally making its West End debut at the newly-rechristened Noel Coward Theatre. This has been previewing for most of the month, and though I have been away for much of it — in the last ten days alone, I feel I have been virtually across the globe, travelling from Adelaide and Sydney to London and New York — it’s been interesting to hear, from afar, how the buzz has been gently building around the show. Its one of the reasons why the producers decided to have an unusually extended preview period for it, at significantly reduced prices — the show needed to trade in that old-fashioned commodity, genuine word-of-mouth, to sell itself, and it seems to have worked. The word has been spreading.
But having loved the show in New York, I’m still going to tonight’s press performance with a little bit of trepidation: does it translate and has it survived the crossing? Actually, if The History Boys can do the journey the other way and be entirely comprehensible to American theatregoers, there’s no reason at all why not. And that’s one of the joys of the theatre: though I have been literally travelling a lot over the last month, the theatre enables you to travel without leaving your theatre seat. And in a fluid theatrical economy between London and New York, we freely exchange the best shows we each produce with each other anyway. It’s great to be able to welcome Avenue Q to London. I hope my colleagues concur…..
I loved Avenue Q, as did the friends I went with, and other friends who went separately.
Mind you, we're all of an age that were brought up with Sesame Street as part of our televisual upbringing -- so we could appreciate it not just on its (frankly superb) theatrical merits, but in the context of the situations it's satirising. Whether the de Jonghs and Billingtons of this world will be able to say the same, that's another matter...