Delightful Smut Puppets, Brought to You By 'Avenue Q'

In snicker-happy "Avenue Q," puppets say the darnedest things. As for the things that puppets do-- well, me-oh-my, one can only imagine how anatomically correct these little darlings would have to be!

It's high time that this grand time of a "Sesame Street" spoof made its way to these parts. As the naughty little brainchild of Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty, the show began life modestly (or maybe immodestly) in 2003 as an off-Broadway offering and then moved uptown, where it gradually achieved hit status and, in a gratifying coup, beat "Wicked" for the 2004 Tony Award for best musical.

Now, the road-company version has dropped by the National Theatre for a couple of weeks. Glory be to the spirit of Joan Ganz Cooney: The musical is as blissfully smutty and subversive as ever -- juicy satire buffed to a professional shine.

The idea here was to take the tidy, moral-driven proclivities of instructional children's television and apply them to the carnal urges and relationship problems of young adults. The primary target audience, then, is those weaned on the vocabulary lessons and counting games of morning TV: "Avenue Q" is the unexpurgated version of that world, the alternate one any cheeky high school junior would want to collaborate on with a bunch of friends in their basements.

The story by Whitty and songs by Lopez and Marx are mocking responses to syrupy, telegenic teaching tools -- they're peppermint twists laced with vodka. Thus, the clever serenades of "Avenue Q" revolve around topics that children of any age wouldn't necessarily want to discuss with their parents ("The Internet Is for Porn"), or they hilariously dwell on the frank failings of human nature ("Everyone's a Little Bit Racist") or even, in the brilliant "Schadenfreude," confess the vicarious pleasures of watching others fail.

What prevents the playful conceits of "Avenue Q" from deteriorating into jaundiced sniping is the inspired and surprisingly affectionate way in which actors and Muppet-esque puppets commingle on the set of the run-down city neighborhood where characters of both flesh and felt live. Given that the joke flirts dangerously with a more toxic kind of ridicule -- a certain defenseless former child star, for instance, comes in for a truly undeserved degree of mockery -- the musical manages most of the time to retain the infectious effervescence of a smart, topical lampoon.

Jason Moore's inventive direction makes expert and varied use of "Sesame Street" convention; every so often, a pair of TV screens descend from on high, offering cartoon supplementation for the lessons in life's turbulence to which the lead young-adult puppet characters, Princeton and Kate Monster, are constantly being subjected. As manipulated and voiced, respectively, by Robert McClure and Kelli Sawyer, Princeton and Kate appealingly evoke that fresh-out-of-college mixture of resilience, insecurity and terror. McClure and Sawyer are every bit as effective and vocally vital as the New York originators of the roles, John Tartaglia and Stephanie D'Abruzzo.

Part of the fun of "Avenue Q" is how the puppet and human personalities seem to merge; your eye wanders from the expressive face of Sawyer to that of the blank puppet on her arm and then back to Sawyer again, until at times they seem indistinguishable from the other. That technical acumen extends to the work of two other actor-puppeteers, David Benoit and Minglie Chen, who often are required to operate one puppet between them, most memorably as the porno-crazed stand-in for Cookie Monster, here called Trekkie Monster.

(They're also terrific separately, playing the devilish Bad Idea Bears, a pair of cuddly critters whose entire roles entail putting suggestions for loutish behavior in Princeton's ear.)

Three other actors are confined strictly to human roles, one being the fine Carla Renata, who plays the washed-up TV star, now relegated to life as the super of "Avenue Q's" tenements. Angela Ai, meanwhile, portrays a character known as Christmas Eve, potentially socko but tricky because it's a knowingly stereotyped portrait of an Asian American woman, down to the Charlie Chan substitutions of her L's and R's.

It works in part because she is being played by an Asian American actress, who is totally in on the outrageous exaggeration of the joke. ("Avenue Q," as you can tell, has a lot of fun at the expense of the idea of tolerance.) It's also successful because the character is not one-dimensional. She's also strong and independent, a modern woman who is no way cowed by her slacker Caucasian fiance, Brian (Cole Porter). Ai, too, delivers in crackerjack style one of the night's standout numbers, the torchy "The More You Ruv Someone."

The characters, for the most part, are too self-aware for us to laugh any way but with them. Which may be why the musical still feels fresh. Although "Avenue Q" is not beneath the taking of some potshots, the sharpshooting remains of a very high caliber.

Avenue Q, music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx; book by Jeff Whitty. Directed by Jason Moore. Puppet design, Rick Lyon; set; Anna Louizos; costumes, Mirena Rada; lighting, Howell Binkley; sound, Acme Sound Partners; orchestrations, Stephen Oremus; choreography, Ken Roberson. About 2 hours 15 minutes. Through Dec. 9 at National Theatre, 1321 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Call 800-447-7400 or visit http://www.telecharge.com.