Avenue Q, Churchill Theatre ****

There are few shows at the Churchill that, for me, feel like professional shows.The years of pantomimes and other poor productions (and even good ones) in this eerily empty-feeling building often makes me depressed on the walk up Bromley High Street. Avenue Q is the first production in this building that has felt like the same standard as a West End production. It is a pastiche on Sesame Street, with some very funny sequences on television screens, but this is not for the Sesame Street audience. This musical contains rude language, innuendo and full on puppet sex scenes. To some extent, I agree with the film critic Robbie Collin when he says that Seth Macfarlane films (but is also applicable to this musical) are just white men laughing at ethnic minorities and this is true to some extent with Avenue Q. However, it is done with the right intentions from Robert Lopez and so the jokes about black people, the Japanese and homosexuals are contextualised in the song 'Everyone's a little bit racist. The set design from Richard Evans looks like every other Avenue Q set design but is professionally done. The puppeteers and actors are truly astonishing, switching between characters at the drop of a hat often speaking whilst another puppeteer moves the puppet they are portraying. The actors disappear and the puppets become the characters, which is a brilliant feat for a show like this. They make the characters their own however they often resort to the voices that have always been used in those characters and it can occasionally seem shackled by the previous long-running productions there have been of this. Saying this, it is a riotous night out at the theatre and is ultimately uplifting.