ON the stage, puppets that look like Jim Henson's Muppets and that live on a block similar to Sesame Street are singing songs that might baffle Big Bird. The lyrics are about trying to find an apartment, a job and love. Instead of instruction in reading and writing and counting, there are lessons about Internet porn and racist feelings and coming out as gay; the vocabulary word for the day is schadenfreude, taking pleasure in the misfortune of others.

The characters are not nursery school pupils but recent college graduates struggling with their new life in New York City. One sings: "I can't pay the bills yet/'Cause I have no skills yet/ The world is a big scary place."

The musical is "Avenue Q," named after one of the few streets in New York (a fictional one) where young newcomers to the city can afford the rent. It opens on Wednesday at the Vineyard Theater, which has posted a sign on the front door: "Warning: Contains Full Puppet Nudity; Not Suitable for Children."

" `Avenue Q' is like children's programming, but for grown-ups," said Jeff Marx, 32, one of the two composer-lyricists. "It started sort of as a parody."

But it went in a different direction, according to Robert Lopez, 28, the other member of the songwriting team. "It's really a story about a 20-something kid who comes to town, and how real life kind of beats him down," Mr. Lopez said.

He meant Princeton, a wide-eyed, mop-topped, slightly paranoid character manipulated by a puppeteer, John Tartaglia. It is on Avenue Q that Princeton rents an apartment and meets his neighbors, some of whom are portrayed by puppets and their handlers and others by performers without puppets. Among them, Christmas Eve (Ann Harada) and her future husband, Brian (Jordan Gelber), and Kate Monster (Stephanie D'Abruzzo, whose puppet has Princeton's wide-eyed gaze but longer hair).

If Mr. Lopez and Mr. Marx bear only passing resemblance to Bert and Ernie, their lives, like those of many of their generation, have been guided by Kermit the Frog. And they do not see why the lessons they learned from puppets should stop, now that they are no longer children. The team has been working on the puppet musical for adults since 1999.

They had met a year earlier, when both were accepted into the BMI-Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop in New York, a training program for new writers. Mr. Lopez, who grew up in Manhattan and went to Yale, wrote his first song when he was 7; Mr. Marx, who grew up in Hollywood, Fla., playing the piano, went to the University of Michigan. Both men wondered why it was that so few of their friends were interested in musical theater.

"We figured out that people our age had actually grown up on musicals — in the form of Muppet movies and `Sesame Street,' " said Mr. Marx, in a recent interview at the theater between matinee and evening performances.

Mr. Lopez continued: "There's something about our generation that resists actors bursting into song on the stage. But when puppets do it, we believe it."

Their first project was a new Muppet movie musical loosely based on "Hamlet" and called "Kermit, Prince of Denmark." While the Jim Henson Company turned the script down — "They said it had no `kid appeal' " Mr. Lopez said — it led to several commissions, including two adaptations of children's books for the children's theater company Theatreworks/USA, and several songs for series on the Disney Channel. But they decided they wanted to try their hand at writing for adults.

"Avenue Q," which is costing more than the Vineyard Theater can afford by itself, is a joint production with the New Group. The budget for the show, said Douglas Aibel, the artistic director of the Vineyard, is about $500,000. "The cost for us of doing musicals," Mr. Aibel said, "has nearly doubled in the last five years."

The musical attracted interest early from commercial producers, at a BMI workshop in 2000. Jeffrey Seller and Kevin McCollum ("Rent") and Robyn Goodman ("Metamorphoses") provided enhancement money for the current production. As was the case with "Urinetown," the creators are young and unknown. In the perpetual quest for the grail of a musical hit, there is often commercial interest in the beginning stages of a show.

"I admire `Urinetown,' " Mr. Lopez said, "and we would be thrilled if our show had a life like that." "Urinetown" started out at the New York International Fringe Festival in 1999 and ended up on Broadway. "But `Avenue Q,' " he added, "owes much more to the `South Park' movie. That was a fantastic musical, and it inspired us, though we wanted to give our show more heart than `South Park' had."

For "Avenue Q," which is directed by Jason Moore, they enlisted a playwright, Jeff Whitty, to write the book, and a puppeteer, Rick Lyon, a veteran of both "Sesame Street" and the movie "Men in Black," to create the puppets.

On Mr. Lyon's Web site (lyonpuppets.com), he writes: "The idea behind `Avenue Q' is basically this: What if a cozy, familiar kids' television show had to grow up? Not just the characters, but the subject matter, the songs, the attitude."

Mr. Lyon is one of four performers who manipulate the puppets onstage. The puppets and puppeteers, fully visible most of the time, are joined by three actors who portray only human characters. One of these (played by Natalie Venetia Belcon) is named Gary Coleman, after the once-popular child actor. The Coleman character in "Avenue Q" has grown up and is working as a building superintendent. "He's the poster child for what the show is about," Mr. Lopez said. "Not feeling special because you're not a kid anymore."

Both Mr. Lopez and Mr. Marx say they believe that they themselves have grown up while working on their musical, and they have tried to put some of the lessons they learned into the show. "I had a relationship with a girlfriend, which led to `There's a fine, fine line between love/ And a waste of time,' " Mr. Lopez said, citing lyrics from one of the songs. "We're still together."

Mr. Marx continued: "And I had a relationship with a boyfriend, which led to `The more you love someone/ The more you want to kill 'em.' " He added, "We broke up."

The lessons have not just been about their personal lives. "When we started," Mr. Lopez said, "we were amateurs. We have learned a lot."

Mr. Marx elaborated: "We have learned how to kiss and schmooze people we don't like."

Jonathan Mandell, who worked as an usher for the Bil Baird Marionette Theater when he was 11, is the editor of GothamGazette .com, a Web site about New York City.

Fuente: The New York Times
Marzo 2003