Avenue Q

Avenue Q drops a fresh graduate with an English degree and no prospects onto a shabby street where most of his new neighbours happen to be puppets, and lands him with the question nobody warned him about: what the degree was actually for, and what he is supposed to do now.

Princeton moves in because it is what he can afford. Around him are a kindergarten teacher who wants to be taken seriously, a closeted banker and his oblivious flatmate, a monster with an internet habit, and a building superintendent who has already had his fame and spent it. They fall in love, fall out, lose jobs, and talk with startling frankness about the things people usually keep quiet.

Jeff Whitty wrote the book, and Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx the music and lyrics. It opened in 2003 and has run in successive productions ever since. The staging is both the joke and the point: puppeteers work in plain view, dressed in grey and never hidden, so the audience watches the performer and believes the puppet at the same time.

The tone is filthy, tuneful and unexpectedly kind. Songs built like children's television carry lines about racism, porn and taking pleasure in other people's misfortune, and the gap between the format and the content is where the comedy lives. Underneath it sits a real argument about early adulthood: that almost nobody gets the life they were promised, and that this is survivable.

It suits anyone who was told they were special and has since had to make other arrangements. Performed live, the trick of watching a puppet fall apart while a person holds it three inches away turns out to work on an audience every time.