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It’s also been superseded in terms of bad-taste musicals, not least by Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s enduring The Book of Mormon, which they co-wrote with Lopez.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 (again, this is a gag that would have been fresher back in the day).
There he sparks up a wholesome relationship with teacher Kate Monster, a less wholesome relationship with Lucy the Slut, and gets enmeshed in the general goings on of his neighbours, human couple Brian (Oliver Jacobson) and Christmas Eve (Amelia Kinu Muus) and repressed Bert and Ernie-alikes Rod and Nicky.
It’s all very well done: Anna Louizos’s sets and Rick Lyon’s puppets look superb to this day, and it’s the endearing stuff – the cute singing boxes or delightfully random puppet cyclist – that impress as much as the naughty bits. It’s a thoughtful homage to Sesame Street, that in some ways stays true to the show’s wide-eyed spirit while amusing itself imagining what might happen if the crushing realities of adulthood encroached. While the humour of Lopez and Marx’s songs has dated to varying degrees, they still stand up well, with their big, bright primary coloured tunes.
It’s a very solid cast too, with the MVP the striking-haired Emily Benjamin – who made a splash as Jessie Buckley’s alternate in Cabaret – in a deserved West End lead role. Not only does she have a tremendous voice, but she nails the physical comedy – and puppeteering – that’s required for her to effectively play Kate Monster and Lucy the Slut at the same time.
There’s a slightly woolly message to it all about growing up and learning to be yourself that could be most kindly viewed as another homage to Sesame Street. Still, the story isn’t that substantial – Jeff Whitty’s book is secondary to the concept – and it vacillates over how earnest it wants to be (notably the edgy jokes about racism vs Kate’s sincere but underdeveloped attempts to stand up for monster rights). The script has been given a cosmetic overhaul and now has references to Trump, AI, etc. It’s all pretty skin deep, though. Again: Avenue Q today is not the punky outsider it was almost a quarter century ago. But as a heritage musical, it remains a delightful one-off.
