Musical sends up any pretensions of what it means to follow a noble calling
What do you do with a BA in English? asks a recent graduate. “What is my life going to be? Four years of college and plenty of knowledge …”, and then things take a darker turn, “have earned me this useless degree!”
Ordinarily I would take umbrage at the suggestion that the fate of someone pursuing literary studies is to bemoan, at the end of it all, “I can’t pay the bills yet, because I have no skills yet”. I would climb on my soapbox and, to mix metaphors, put on my boxing gloves.
Academics in the arts and humanities are used to specious claims, such as we have been corrupted by Marxist-vegan-social-justice-warrior-greenie-identity-politics cant, and we pass this corruption on to our snowflake millennial students. We should think and teach “more like scientists”. We don’t contribute to the economy or to engineering or to healthcare.
After defending our arcane vocation, we retreat to safe spaces: recline on a chaise longue, book in hand; visit art galleries, where we hold forth to captive audiences; meet in clandestine groups to plot the overthrow of Stem subjects; and visit the theatre, where we sit in the dark and feel clever.
You can guess how I felt when, soon after the lights dimmed at Montecasino Theatre, a character named Princeton appeared on stage and sang the opening number of genre-busting musical Avenue Q, “What Do You Do With a BA in English?”
You can guess, but you’d be wrong. Because this is a show that affronts, delights, challenges and amuses its audience by flouting every assumption you might make. For starters, Princeton, like nine of the 12 characters in Avenue Q, is a puppet. This is the big selling point and the greatest marketing stumbling block facing a new production of the Broadway hit; describing the show as “Sesame Street for adults” doesn’t do justice to it.
The puppets swear and have sex. They also facilitate a new contract between performers and audience members, an agreement that “we’re in uncharted territory”. Thus, anything goes.
The creators of Avenue Q, having hit on this contrivance, exploit its liberating potential. Perhaps it also helped that they didn’t actually expect anyone to see the show they were developing. In 2002 Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx were battling to establish themselves in the American entertainment industry. “The story was really based on our own lives and the lives of our friends,” they recall, “working in jobs that we were all very overqualified for, and we felt terribly stuck and unappreciated.”
Despite this autobiographical impulse, Avenue Q never takes itself too seriously. It is the knowing noughties’ antidote to the sentimental nineties. In particular, it is a riposte of sorts to Rent, the rock musical that took inspiration from Puccini’s opera La Boheme.
In Rent, a group of downand-out creative types live and love and suffer earnestly as they try to make it big in New York. This is more or less the premise of Avenue Q, except that from the outset it spoofs any narcissistic sense of what it means to follow a noble calling.
Princeton’s problem is not that he did a BA, it’s the naïve ambition and self-importance of youth: “Somehow I can’t shake ... the feeling I might make ... a difference to the human race!”
It’s now 15 years since Avenue Q made its mark on Broadway. The world has changed again. Numbers like Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist or jokes about how Japanese people confuse the letters L and R don’t quite land in contemporary SA — or the US — as they might have in 2003.
And yet the show won’t allow itself to be tied to this kind of critique. It’s too clever for that; it caricatures its own caricatures. Avenue Q, under the cynicism, also has a big heart. We find ourselves caring, deeply and against expectation, about the characters and their fortunes. Ultimately, this is attributable to the versatile talents of an excellent cast. Even if most of them did arts degrees.