Shaftesbury Theatre

Avenue Q was never going to be the number one most zeitgeisty musical of 2026. It’s not that Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx’s subversive ’00s classic has aged badly, even if a couple of its more wilfully transgressive moments – notable the song ‘Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist’ – land a bit ickily in the MAGA era. And sure, some of its reference points have dated: a song about how everyone uses the internet to watch porn (‘The Internet is for Porn’) was clearly considerably sharper in 2003. On the whole, though, the main flaw with Avenue Q in 2026 is that Avenue Q did it first. By which I mean that the jaw-dropping audacity of a rude musical theatre parody of Sesame Street has now largely gone – it is a very famous show that ran for five years in the West End the first time around and almost 20 in New York.  It’s also been superseded in terms of bad-taste musicals, not least by Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s enduring The Book of Mormon, which they co-wrote with Lopez.  Accept all that, and Jason Moore’s revived production is a fun piece of naughty noughties nostalgia that raises a smile from the sight of its fluffy yellow stage curtain onwards. Princeton (Noah Harrison) is a wet-behind-the-ears young puppet who has just graduated from university (‘What Do You Do with a BA in English?’)  and is now looking for a place to live on Avenue Q, a shabby but affordable neighbourhood in outer NYC that boasts former child actor Gary Colman (Dionne Ward-Anderson) as its superintendent...

There must be one thought on every parent’s mind as they shuffle themselves and whatever entourage of children they’ve brought with them into the Lyric Theatre to see ‘The Gruffalo’: please don’t mess this up. So beloved is Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s bedtime book that it’s not just a load of grumpy kids that’ll be left sitting there should the show not live up to expectations, it’s a room full of disappointed adults whose first few years of parenthood and the memories that come with them are likely to have been shaped by this story and its inimitable rhymes. Worry not, Gruffalo fans. This is a charming production from Tall Stories that has been running since 2001 with various tweaks and upgrades along the way, and it’s not hard to see why it’s managed to stay around so long. The familiar stuff’s all there – the jittery mouse, the sneering fox, the aloof owl and the sly snake, kitted out in imaginative costumes that add a nice bit of wonder to the experience – but it’s been bulked out to hit a one-hour run-time. Characters are given a bit more space to develop, and each has a rip-roaring song that takes the show from bouncing ska to slick disco before ending on a chugging grunge rock number that has everyone clapping along. If that doesn’t keep you gripped, there’s an extended section in which audience members are invited to crack out their finest gruffalo growls – hilarious for the kids, cathartic for the parents, chaos for the performers – but otherwise the show...