Muppets For Our Times

The performance is being advertised as a "brutal" Broadway musical, but it is more musical than brutal. The show features actors who manipulate puppets that are suspiciously familiar to the ones on the television shows Sesame Street. But these puppets speak in slang and touch on adult themes with humour and a degree of the grotesque that is atypical of a musical. All in all, Avenue Q is not hard to like.

Director Mária Harangi does not attempt to give the piece a depth that it does not have. She doesn't wish to shock, rather she brings out the substance of the piece with the highest degree of professionalism.

The actors in the piece are difficult to describe, but precisely because of the quality of their performances. One first sees the puppets themselves as actors. The figures behind them are secondary. But a closer look shows the remarkable flexibility of the cast, many of whom play multiple roles.

Anna Balogh plays Kate with a refined humour, but injects a jolt of energy into her performance when she becomes the vamp Lucy. Péter Vári-Kovács plays the roles of both Princeton and Rod with a degree irony mixed with a pedantic, dreamy feeling. Péter Janicsek plays Nick with affectionate humour and the infatuated but good-hearted Trekkie Monster with a punch. Attila Serbán plays without a puppet but in his parodistic, rather than ironic, portrayal of a Michael Jackson figure he appears quite like a puppet.

One understands why Avenue Q was a success on Broadway and will likely be a hit in Budapest as well.

Author: Balázs Urbán / Photo: MTI

Muppets For Our Times

English