Audio | 'If You Were Gay,' from the cast recording of 'Avenue Q'
Audio | 'What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?' from the cast recording of 'Avenue Q'
Audio | 'The Avenue Q Theme,' from the cast recording of 'Avenue Q'
Video | Scenes from 'Avenue Q'
Graphic | Who's who on Avenue Q
IF YOU GO
What:Avenue Q by Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff WhittyWhere: Sanford and Dolores Ziff Ballet Opera House, Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., MiamiWhen: 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 7:30 p.m. Sunday, 2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday; through May 18Cost: $20-$68Info: 305-949-6722, www.arshtcenter.org or TicketmasterLike so many Americans of a certain age, Jeff Marx and Robert ''Bobby'' Lopez, the guys who dreamed up the Tony Award-winning musical Avenue Q, spent their youngest years watching Sesame Street.
Marx was born the year after the Children's Television Workshop show went on the air in 1969, Lopez five years later. Along with their parents, the Muppets were some of their earliest teachers.
Marx, who grew up in Hollywood, Fla., and sang with a bar mitzvah band while he went to Pine Crest School (being a bar mitzvah star was ''a great thing for an insecure gay kid,'' Marx says with a laugh), had ditched his dream of becoming an actor by 1997. After graduating from law school, he joined the BMI Musical Theater Workshop in New York, hoping to find talented young clients. Lopez, a Yale grad from Greenwich Village, had also joined the workshop.
The two became friends and discovered they liked similar music. So they started writing together. One project, seven songs written for what they imagined could be a Muppet movie titled Kermit, Prince of Denmark (with a Dane both melancholy and green), won them a major musical theater award. But it wasn't until they had been working together for almost two years, searching for one great idea, that Avenue Q -- the unconventional little show that became a monster hit -- was conceived.
The inspiration for Avenue Q, the people-and-puppets musical opening Tuesday at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts (it returns to play the Broward Center next season), came to Lopez in the wee hours of early August 1999.
As detailed in Avenue Q: The Book,a sleepless Lopez looked at the television in his parents' home late one night and thought, ''Sesame Street meets Friends. And that's what I wrote at the top of a page.'' He called Marx and asked, ''What about a grown-up children's television show, but for people our age?'' Marx replied, ''That's it! That's it! That's the million-dollar idea we've been looking for.'' And it was.
EDUCATIONAL MUSICAL
The essence of the idea: Use Muppet-like puppets and human characters in a faux ''educational'' musical about the life challenges -- from jobs to relationships and sex to forging a personal identity -- faced by folks not long out of college.
Jason Moore, who became the show's director early in its evolution, observes that ``the genius of Avenue Q [lies in] using a familiar form to tell an unfamiliar story.''
By May 2000, Marx and Lopez had created what they envisioned as a television pilot. Avenue Q: Children's Television for Twentysomethings had attracted the attention of Robyn Goodman, a Broadway producer who arranged a reading. She invited producer friends, who saw the work of three Sesame Street puppeteers who would (along with Avenue Q) eventually wind up on Broadway: Rick Lyon (who also designed the show's puppets), John Tartaglia and Stephanie D'Abruzzo. Because it was ''just'' a reading, the creators didn't bother to hide the performers -- a happy accident that led to the actors and their puppet characters being fully visible, creating a kind of duality that would help Tartaglia and D'Abruzzo to eventual Tony Award nominations.
After that reading, Avenue Q took a sharp turn toward the stage. Jeffrey Seller, one of the producers of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Rent, was in the audience and told Marx he'd be interested in producing the show as theater. His Rent producing partner, Kevin McCollum, also jumped on board. And after the addition of book writer Jeff Whitty, director Moore, a design team and several other actors -- and almost three more years of hard work and collaborative conflict -- Avenue Q opened Off-Broadway in 2003, then moved to Broadway that July.
Avenue Q's birthing process was far from a romp in the theatrical equivalent of a children's TV playland. Whitty, added after Marx and Lopez had forged their professional partnership, butted heads with the composer-lyricists. But he says today, ``It was a real asset that we were not friends. When you work with friends, the friendship becomes the most important thing to preserve. We all had our monster moments. We learned how to work and not stress out.''
One problem Avenue Q didn't have, surprisingly enough, was legal troubles with the Jim Henson Company or with actor Gary Coleman, who is a character in the show(one portrayed by a woman). Marx, who understands the law regarding parody and says his legal training gave him ''a skill set of being diligent and nitpicky and splitting hairs and being anal in the best sense of the word,'' took preemptive action by inviting Henson's daughter Cheryl and widow Jane to the first reading. Though Avenue Q uses a disclaimer noting that it isn't authorized or approved by the Henson Company or Sesame Workshop, Henson's family had no problem with the show, Marx says.
From the get-go, Avenue Q has followed an unconventional path to success.
When the decision was made to transfer to Broadway at the very start of the 2003-2004 season, producer McCollum says, ''people thought we were crazy'' to make that expensive leap. To keep the show visible, the producers ran a series of ads welcoming subsequent productions -- including its lavish, far costlier rival Wicked -- to Broadway. Avenue Q did an Oscar-style campaign for the Tony Award, and it worked: best musical, best original score and best book went to the little show that could. Instead of hitting the road right away, Avenue Q spent nine months in its own $40 million theater at the Wynn Las Vegas Resort. McCollum puts a positive spin on the decision to delay a tour: 'People now know what it is. They say, `This is so different and unusual, you have to see it.' ''
McCollum thinks that one of the reasons for the appeal of ''a small show with big ideas'' lies in how audiences receive edgy material -- raw language, a sex scene, controversial topics -- delivered by puppets.
''It's kind of what the Greeks did with masks,'' McCollum says by phone from his Manhattan office. ``They couldn't go after their political leaders, so they put masks on. Here, we can talk about the Internet being for porn, or everyone being a little bit racist.''
Avenue Q proved a life-changing event for many of those involved. Lyon made his Broadway debut at 45, met his wife Tonya Dixon when she was cast as Gary Coleman in the Las Vegas production of Avenue Q and is now going to become a first-time father at 50. Moore is now busy guiding the stage musical version of Shrek to Broadway. Moore, Whitty and the key Avenue Q producers also are working on a new musical based on Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City.
But perhaps the biggest changes have happened in the lives of the Avenue Q composers, Marx and Lopez.
JUGGLING PROJECTS
Lopez, now married to composer Kristen Anderson-Lopez (whom he credits with being ''the fifth Beatle'' during the development of Avenue Q), is juggling life as the father of a 3-year-old daughter and numerous projects, including one with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, writing for Nick Jr.'s Wonder Pets, working with his wife (they did a Finding Nemo musical for Disney World's Animal Kingdom) and collaborating with Marx.
Success has brought myriad opportunities, but Lopez says, ``I was very focused on trying to keep in touch with what it was that motivated me to write before. When your life changes, you inevitably change with it. But I never really stopped. I've been driven to be a musical theater writer since I was 11 years old.''
Marx, however, got lost for awhile.
''Avenue Q was the best and worst thing to happen to me,'' Marx says. 'It's easy to retire and feel successful and lose that edge. It's easy to make bank deposits and watch TV and throw parties, instead of struggling and thinking, `Will I ever find my purpose?' ''
Happily, he has. When he and Lopez were asked to write a musical episode of the TV show Scrubs, Marx fell in love with California and working in a new medium. He moved to Los Angeles, where he's working on projects for movies, television and Broadway, some with Lopez, some with others.
'Having written Avenue Q, I found out it doesn't need me anymore. I'd show up at the theater and they'd say, `What do you want?' '' Marx says, laughing. ``I wanted to go somewhere where I didn't know anybody, where I had no contacts, no knowledge. It's a challenge again.''
