Best Touring Production in the Last Year: Avenue Q
Carol Rosegg
Best Touring Production in the Last Year
The Reader’s Choice: Avenue Q
Set in the fringiest fringe neighborhood of contemporary New York, the adult puppet musical Avenue Q fuses Sesame Street whimsy with Rent grit: playwright Jeff Whitty and songwriters Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx appropriate the format of a kids’ TV show to examine the crises of young adulthood from a satirical and sometimes raunchy perspective. The touring edition—which finally made it to Chicago’s Cadillac Palace last spring, four years after director Jason Moore’s Broadway hit won a trio of Tonys—featured a crack ensemble of singer-actor-puppeteers as well as ingenious animated video. My runners-up in this category also played the Cadillac Palace: The Drowsy Chaperone, a hilarious and inventive spoof of 1920s musicals, and John Doyle’s bold, minimalist rethinking of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, in which the singer-actors also doubled as the orchestra. —Albert Williams
Our readers’ choice: Xanadu
Through 3/29: Tue and Thu 7:30 PM, Wed and Sun 2 and 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Drury Lane Theatre Water Tower Place, 175 E. Chestnut, 312-902-1400, drurylanewatertower.com, $22.50-$84.50
