When I was a young college graduate, if I had listened to the Bad Idea Bears, life would have turned out very different for me. The Bears are two of the puppet creations that populate the outer-boroughs world of Avenue Q, a wise-cracking musical for the way-past Sesame Street set that left me weeping with laughter. Imagine Snuggles the fabric softener mascot inhabited by the spirit of Eddie Haskell.

Along with three conventional actors, four puppeteers—Jennifer Barnhart, Stephanie D'Abruzzo, Rick Lyon, and John Tartaglia—create more than nine puppet characters onstage, but in full view of the audience, with no ventriloquism. This works a lot better than you might think, because each performer replicates his puppet character's facial and body language, providing more expressivity than foam and cloth can provide. In the case of Ricky, a happy-go-lucky analogue of Ernie the Muppet who finds himself homeless in the middle of act two, Barnhart manipulates one hand while Lyon handles the head and the other hand and provides Ricky's voice. Things get more complicated when two characters created by one performer have a scene together, as when D'Abruzzo's Kate Monster and Lucy T. Slut have a catfight: in this case, Barnhart handles Lucy's body while D'Abruzzo voices both characters. True to the Sesame Street idiom (all four have the credit), the puppet characters do that hop-walk thing to move across stage.

Anna Louizos has designed a cunning set, three mismatched housefronts in a shabbier part of New York (is that a mezuzah or a wad of gum?). Various bits of the houses (a rollup door, a bay window) open up to expose suggestive miniaturized interior sets, while the actors enter through the three exterior-now-interior doors. Kate Monster's eighth-scale cozy apartment is only missing the tabby cat. The housefront windows are painted to represent slats and sashes, broken glass, security bars; they look sort of cheesy until a character opens the window like a Laugh-In door, as when Trekkie Monster pops out to sing that the Internet is a wonderful place "for porn." Somehow the windows are also used for projected post card images of Manhattan tourist attractions for "There Is a Life Outside Your Apartment."

The rooftops are used as well: a gigantic relationship commitment monster appears briefly, as big and nearly as terrifying as Little Shop of Horrors's Audrey II. Later, when Kate Monster appears with a representation of the Empire State Building's spire, it's good for an "aww..." from the audience. The creators know that no effect is too cheap if used correctly, so a brief sequence with smoke, disco ball, and Lawrence Welk soap bubbles comes off.

Video monitors on each side of the proscenium provide animated interludes to cover scene changes and to count 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15 Minute Intermission.

Kate Monster and Princeton's boy-meets-girl story is conventional, although the Bad Idea Bears spice it up a bit ("Let's have fun! Let's order Long Island Iced Teas!")

What's more interesting is the relationship between Rod (Bert-ish, closeted, Republican, and investment banker) and Ricky (not gay, but happy to help his roommate out).

The music is light-hearted and unchallenging, mainstream Broadway. Once or twice its connection to the book is tenuous: "I Wish I Could Go Back to College" is a perfectly good song, but it feels arbitrarily plopped into the middle of the second act. But you have to love a show that includes singing packing boxes, or that explains "Schadenfreude" in comic book colors. And "There's a Fine, Fine Line" (between love and a waste of time) deserves to become a standard.

And a special shout-out to Northwestern alum Stephanie D'Abruzzo!

posted: 2:13:38 PM