Schadenfreude
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Avenue Q, while not the most...um, polite of musicals definitely qualifies as genius!
Thanks for Jeremy and the firm for which he is a summer intern (whichever one that may be, I don’t know!), Kimi, Susan and I got to see Avenue Q the musical! It was a great parody of sesame street and the electric company including the two talking heads the add two words together such as “come” “mittment” to = “committment” and counting exercises like counting down from 5 nightstands to 4, 3, 2, then 1: One-night stand! They were very clever and sometimes pretty shocking.
The most amazing part was the connection between the puppeteers and their puppets. The puppeteer had all the expressions and body language that was appropriate for the moment and the puppet acted as an extension of their own bodies. It was kind of strange because you could look back and forth between the two and get the same idea but one would express the emotion better than the other. It was seamless.
The fact that they had someone play Gary Coleman was my first clue that it was going to be a great musical. It begins with each character singing the different reasons why it “sucks to be me!” At the end, Gary comes out and they all realize that, “Hey! I’m not so bad off! It sucks to be him!” My favorite part was a song called Schadenfreude--happiness at the misery of others, exemplified by that first song. Gary found his reason for living in that song--as long as people feel happy looking upon his misery, Gary was helping others! That was his purpose in life!
The best part was that Susan had a ticket up in the 6th row, and after the intermission, she told us that there were two empty seats in front of her! So Kimi and I got to move down to row 5! Weee! That was a great relief considering that Jeremy had called saying he had 2 free tickets and there were 3 of us. So we ran down to the box office and lined up for cancellations (we had already missed the lottery). 15 minutes before the show began, it was looking like one of us was going to have to skip out...BUT miracle of miracles! Just the right number of cancellations came through to let us get one more ticket! W00t! We all pitched in and split the ticket price and we all won in the end. Ah, the joys of friendship! 
Anyway, if you’re in town and you have a dark, sarcastic soul, you might just want to catch Avenue Q. It’s definitely hilarious in its dark, shocking way.
Barrett Foa is the guy who played the lead in the show we saw
Gary Coleman?! I thought he was awsome on LucasArts Monkey Island 3 as Kenny the swindling lemonade boy. That was a highlight in his career.
Posted by on 06/26 at 11:51 PMahh, your RSS feed is working! yay! And yeah, I’ll try to let you know ahead of time when I’m gonna call, k?
Posted by Datchan on 06/27 at 03:09 AMi can’t believe you put the headshot of that actor from avenue q on your website. i was innocently scrolling through your posting when i was blinded by teeth! my eyes!
Posted by on 06/27 at 06:36 PMmy favorites were “if you were gay” (it’d be okay!) and “everyone’s a little bit racist” and “it sucks to be me”.
and yah… this was the most hilarious and inappropriate musical/muppet show that i’ve ever seen!
thank you, jeremy! we appreciate the tickets =)
Posted by kimi =) on 06/27 at 07:32 PM