Avenue Q Quotes

Sometimes I feel like New Yorkers do New York wrong. Where are the people swinging from subway poles and dancing on fire escapes and kissing in Times Square? The post office flash mob proposal was a start, but when’s the next big number? I pictured New York like West Side Story plus In the Heights plus Avenue Q—but really, it’s just construction and traffic and iPhones and humidity.

I don't know. Sometimes I feel like New Yorkers do New York wrong. Where are the people swinging from subway poles and dancing on fire escapes and kissing in Times Square? The post office flash mob proposal was a start, but when's the next big number? I pictured New York like West Side Story plus In the Heights plus Avenue Q--but really, it's just construction and traffic and iPhones and humidity. They might as well write musicals about Milton, Georgia. We'd open with a ballad: 'Sunday at the Mall.' And then 'I Left My Heart at Target,' If Ethan were here, he'd have the whole libretto written by the time we stepped out of the car.

When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was filled with rejoicings. [Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from the Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets were securely sealed in glass cases. Coins were well and duly laid under stones. Hospitals were founded. Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the dozen were burnt in effigy in the market place, together with scores of peasant boys with the label ‘I am a base Pretender’, lolling from their mouths. The Queen’s cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that very same night. Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from the Countess of R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the Marchioness of P., Mrs. W.E. Gladstone, and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding her of ancient alliances between their family and her own, etc.] — all of which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason that a parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando’s life. She skipped it, to get on with the text

When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was filled with rejoicings. [Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from the Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets were securely sealed in glass cases. Coins were well and duly laid under stones. Hospitals were founded. Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the dozen were burnt in effigy in the market place, together with scores of peasant boys with the label ‘I am a base Pretender’, lolling from their mouths. The Queen’s cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that very same night. Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from the Countess of R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the Marchioness of P., Mrs. W.E. Gladstone, and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding her of ancient alliances between their family and her own, etc.] — all of which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason that a parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando’s life. She skipped it, to get on with the text.

When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was filled with rejoicings. [Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from the Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets were securely sealed in glass cases. Coins were well and duly laid under stones. Hospitals were founded. Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the dozen were burnt in effigy in the market place, together with scores of peasant boys with the label ‘I am a base Pretender’, lolling from their mouths. The Queen’s cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that very same night. Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from the Countess of R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the Marchioness of P., Mrs. W.E. Gladstone, and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding her of ancient alliances between their family and her own, etc.] — all of which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason that a parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando’s life. She skipped it, to get on with the text.

Robert Askins Brings ‘Hand to God’ to Broadway Chad Batka for The New York Times Robert Askins at the Booth Theater, where his play “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday. By MICHAEL PAULSON The conceit is zany: In a church basement, a group of adolescents gathers (mostly at the insistence of their parents) to make puppets that will spread the Christian message, but one of the puppets turns out to be more demonic than divine. The result — a dark comedy with the can-puppets-really-do-that raunchiness of “Avenue Q” and can-people-really-say-that outrageousness of “The Book of Mormon” — is “Hand to God,” a new play that is among the more improbable entrants in the packed competition for Broadway audiences over the next few weeks. Given the irreverence of some of the material — at one point stuffed animals are mutilated in ways that replicate the torments of Catholic martyrs — it is perhaps not a surprise to discover that the play’s author, Robert Askins, was nicknamed “Dirty Rob” as an undergraduate at Baylor, a Baptist-affiliated university where the sexual explicitness and violence of his early scripts raised eyebrows. But Mr. Askins had also been a lone male soloist in the children’s choir at St. John Lutheran of Cypress, Tex. — a child who discovered early that singing was a way to make the stern church ladies smile. His earliest performances were in a deeply religious world, and his writings since then have been a complex reaction to that upbringing. “It’s kind of frustrating in life to be like, ‘I’m a playwright,’ and watch people’s face fall, because they associate plays with phenomenally dull, didactic, poetic grad-schoolery, where everything takes too long and tediously explores the beauty in ourselves,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s not church, even though it feels like church a lot when we go these days.” The journey to Broadway, where “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday at the Booth Theater, still seems unlikely to Mr. Askins, 34, who works as a bartender in Brooklyn and says he can’t afford to see Broadway shows, despite his newfound prominence. He seems simultaneously enthralled by and contemptuous of contemporary theater, the world in which he has chosen to make his life; during a walk from the Cobble Hill coffee shop where he sometimes writes to the Park Slope restaurant where he tends bar, he quoted Nietzsche and Derrida, described himself as “deeply weird,” and swore like, well, a satanic sock-puppet. “If there were no laughs in the show, I’d think there was something wrong with him,” said the actor Steven Boyer, who won raves in earlier “Hand to God” productions as Jason, a grief-stricken adolescent with a meek demeanor and an angry-puppet pal. “But anybody who is able to write about such serious stuff and be as hilarious as it is, I’m not worried about their mental health.” Mr. Askins’s interest in the performing arts began when he was a boy attending rural Texas churches affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod denomination; he recalls the worshipers as “deeply conservative, old farm folks, stone-faced, pride and suffering, and the only time anybody ever really livened up was when the children’s choir would perform.” “My grandmother had a cross-stitch that said, ‘God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing,’ and so I got into that,” he said. “For somebody who enjoys performance, that was the way in.” The church also had a puppet ministry — an effort to teach children about the Bible by use of puppets — and when Mr. Askins’s mother, a nurse, began running the program, he enlisted to help. He would perform shows for other children at preschools and vacation Bible camps. “The shows are wacky, but it was fun,” he said. “They’re badly written attempts to bring children to Jesus.” Not all of his formative encounters with puppets were positive. Particularly scarring: D

Though they did not instantly grasp the ultimate significance of the money market fund, Brown and Bent understood completely that they were making the first real assault on Regulation Q. Here is Henry Brown describing the moment of epiphany: “It was a frustrating time,” he wrote in an unpublished chronicle, of their disastrous first two years in business. (“Bent calculated that the proprietor of the hot dog stand at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 53rd Street was making twice as much money as either of them.”) In a moment of desperation, Bent one day asked Brown:

And so you cannot back up. You go into harm’s way as true human beings. Just like our foe. Think now, if you should die, all of the words you have read, the places you’ve been, the knowledge and the wisdom you have gained, it will altogether vanish like a dream. Every note of music, every brushstroke of every painting, every q-bit, every sim, all that laughter, so many tears, and suddenly…nothing. Perhaps an earlier backup of another you does remain safely stored in some remote offline facility. Your memories of the Beijing Opera, the candomblé in Bahía, the dunes of al-Qudd, a walk down the grand avenues of Cupertino, the white nights of Putingrad, the call to prayer on the Habitat of Peace, a red supermoon over the Armadalen Sea, the crumbs of a pastry and the last mouthful of coffee in a tiny café in Trastevere, everything you have ever known, remembered, talked about, and everything you have left unspoken—it could all live again, I suppose. But would that be you, Doctor Saito? The you here with me? Right now?” The color had drained from her face. That was better. That was how people should react to encountering the

Rent creates new possibilities for characters’ sexualities in musicals by representing multiple gay and lesbian characters with frank and casual openness. Rent is peopled with a gay male couple (Angel and Collins) and a lesbian couple (Maureen and Joanne) and it takes those sexualities for granted in the musical’s world of NYC’s East Village circa 1990. Rent’s structure—a single protagonist, Mark, surrounded by a close-knit community—borrows formal conventions of ensemble musicals of the late 1960s and 1970s, including Hair, Company, Godspell, and A Chorus Line. This structure enables the musical to nod to nonheterosexual identities and relationships, an ideological gesture that speaks to its (successful) intention to address musical theater’s wide range of spectators and even make them feel politically progressive. This device of including a few gay characters in a community-based story is repeated with the gay male couples in Avenue Q and Spring Awakening, and perhaps foretells a musical theater future with a more consistent nod to gay people (or gay men, at least).

Rent creates new possibilities for characters’ sexualities in musicals by representing multiple gay and lesbian characters with frank and casual openness. Rent is peopled with a gay male couple (Angel and Collins) and a lesbian couple (Maureen and Joanne) and it takes those sexualities for granted in the musical’s world of NYC’s East Village circa 1990. Rent’s structure—a single protagonist, Mark, surrounded by a close-knit community—borrows formal conventions of ensemble musicals of the late 1960s and 1970s, including Hair, Company, Godspell, and A Chorus Line. This structure enables the musical to nod to nonheterosexual identities and relationships, an ideological gesture that speaks to its (successful) intention to address musical theater’s wide range of spectators and even make them feel politically progressive. This device of including a few gay characters in a community-based story is repeated with the gay male couples in Avenue Q and Spring Awakening, and perhaps foretells a musical theater future with a more consistent nod to gay people (or gay men, at least).14 Still, both Rent and Spring Awakening ultimately use gay characters to bolster heteronormativity. Angel serves as the emotional touchstone of Rent, endlessly generous and hopeful, caring and sensitive. All mourn his death, which compels the other characters to look at their lives and choices. That Angel’s death enables the other characters to learn about themselves replicates a typical (tired) trope in which an Other (usually a person of color or a person with a disability) aids in the self-actualization of the principal character. Also, Collins and Angel have the most loving and healthy relationship, which the musical needs to eliminate so as not to valorize the gay male couple above all else. In addition, Joanne and Maureen sing a lively number, “Take Me or Leave Me,” but the musical doesn’t take their relationship seriously. Maureen is presented as a fickle, emotionally abusive, yet irresistible lover (Joanne and Mark’s duet, “The Tango Maureen”) and a less-than-accomplished artist (her “The Cow Jumped over the Moon” is a parody of performance art).15 In contrast, Mimi