Sweet and sour

Avenue Q
Gielgud

Death of Long Pig
Finborough

It opened in 2006. The critics hated it. Two years later it was still running, but with audiences in decline last autumn Cameron Mackintosh announced its closure, which prompted a huge box-office surge. In the spring it was finally replaced by Calendar Girls but Avenue Q has boomeranged straight back into the West End. So what is it? I vaguely expected some schmaltzy Muppet Show spin-off but this is a more complex and unexpected creature. We’re in New York. On stage we see puppets whose figures are being manipulated by actors who ventriloquise a bit, although you can still see their lips move. That shouldn’t work but never mind. The characters are all adults but the rhyme schemes, the melodies and the upbeat musical texture is drawn from kids’ TV, and this sugary idiom is applied to the tribulations of professional life in the big bad city. It’s a brilliant piece of counter-intuition. Grown-up theme, kiddie approach. Saccharine and cynicism mingled. The first song questions the value of an English literature degree to the New York job-hunter — hardly an instant choice for the opening number of a hit musical, but beneath the nursery-rhyme innocence lies a lyric that’s funny, clever and alarmingly true. ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist Sometimes’ examines an abiding obsession of the urban bourgeoisie and reminds us, in a cheery singalong anthem, that our overheated endeavours to neutralise prejudice merely reinforce the vice we want to diminish. When one of the puppets becomes homeless there’s a song about schadenfreude, which concludes that tramps, by cheering us up with a public exhibition of their misfortunes, deserve to be funded by general taxation. Creatively this is extremely daring. The show wants it both ways and gets it both ways.