When most people think about Avenue Q, the first thing they think of is puppets. “Sesame Street for adults,” some people say. But it always comes back to the puppets. Alex Spear thinks that the comparison to Sesame Street is well deserved. “The original Sesame Street was to teach important life lessons.” In this show, the message is just as important, but not for kids and absolutely not endorsed by Jim Henson and his company! “There are certain morals that should be part of all of our lives.”
Avenue Q is a show that asks you to completely suspend your disbelief. There are puppets on stage interacting with humans. We make no effort at all to hide the puppeteer as they are part of the show as well.
We were so lucky that halfway through our rehearsal process we were able to spend a whole day in a master class with Scott Hitz, a professional puppeteer who worked on the pre-Broadway production of Avenue Q. One of the things he introduced the cast to was the Japanese art of Bunraku puppets. This beautiful tradition of puppeteering has an entire crew of people to manipulate one puppet.
This background and training was especially pertinent to Alicia Caron and Alex Spear who team together to bring the character Nicky to life. According to Alicia, things began to really develop as she took cues from Alex and they learned the character together. “How he phrases things, how he moves.” Most of the communication between the two is completely nonverbal, through breath cues, and a mutual understanding of purpose and intention.
“It just kind of grew through the run, as we understood Nicky and each other more,” says Alex. “You can spend all the time with the character, watching videos and other interpretations, but until we got to work with the actual puppet, then we really began to click and find Nicky’s personality.”
Stephanie McCall, one of our co-directors had this to say, “Having spent six months pouring over the script, I could never have imagined the puppet characters coming so vividly to life. Each night during our run-throughs the cast brings something new and deliciously fun to an already amazing script.”
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