Avenue Q: The fuzzy face of deception.

The pleasant afterglow of an unexpected Best Musical Tony win didn’t last long for Avenue Q, Broadway’s latest little show that could. On June 10, four days after the Jeff Marx/Bobby Lopez/Jeff Whitty musical comedy picked up its statues for Best Score and Best Book in addition to the big one, the Broadway community was stunned by a front page New York Times piece (front page below the fold—this is theatre we’re talking about) about the show’s plans for the future.

“The producers of…the newly minted Tony-winner for best musical, have decided to forgo a national tour and opt instead for a long-term, open-ended run in Las Vegas, a city they say is perfectly suited for their subversively funny puppet show,” reported Jesse McKinley in the Times.  “Working with the Las Vegas impresario Steve Wynn, the producers of Q plan to open around Labor Day 2005 in a new $40-million theatre built especially for the show.” The Broadway community’s collective jaw hit the floor, although astute news watchers might have gotten a head’s up from the Las Vegas Sun three days earlier, when “VegasBeat” reporter Timothy Darrah wrote that “spies knowledgeable about the Great White Way tell us that the casino mogul [Wynn] is planning to bring Avenue Q exclusively to an 1,180-seat venue he will build at Wynn Las Vegas.”

The New York Post’s Michael Reidel, always ready for the latest controversy, was there the next day with teeth bared. “It’s Puppetgate!” his column screamed on June 11, suggesting that “Broadway was reeling from the news yesterday that Avenue Q — which won the Tony for Best Musical by positioning itself as the little show with heart — has sold its soul to Las Vegas for several million dollars.” Also reeling were the various road producers who had been eagerly awaiting the chance to bring the profitable show to their respective cities…and who made no secret, either in the New York or their hometown paper that they voted for it for exactly that reason. In the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a producer at the Playhouse Square Center tells Tony Brown “This is America, and the producers of Avenue Q are free to do what they want. But I can tell you I feel like I had the wool — or in this case, the fur —  pulled over my eyes.” Similar laments were expressed to Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune and in papers all over the country.

Since it was the Las Vegas Sun’s entertainment column that was first with the Q-goes-to-Vegas story, let’s hear them out on another prediction, reported in the same column: “We also hear that Wynn is looking to import Hugh Jackman to the Strip.”

CONTRARIAN AWARD

Playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer did not get caught up in the outpouring of goodwill surrounding the death of our 40th president. “The man who murdered more gay people than anyone in the entire history of the world is dead,” writes Kramer in the new issue of the Advocate, referring to the infamous reticence of the Reagan Administration to aggressively combat, or even publicly acknowledge, the AIDS crisis.  Kramer’s piece is titled “Adolph Reagan,” and it claims that “Gays were as hated under Reagan as Jews were under Hitler.” Kramer also relates what he told People magazine when they called to ask him how he felt: “'I wish he had died before he was elected’ is what I told them.”

WHAT RHYMES WITH MISOGYNY?

Marshall Mathers, aka Eminem

Two great lyricists, who are probably not close friends, were in the news recently: Eminem because he’s been busy in the courtroom, and Bob Dylan because a professor just appointed to a high profile post at Oxford is something of a Dylanophile.

The professor is Christopher Ricks, new Professor of Poetry at England’s most prestigious university, and whose most recent book is Dylan’s Visions of Sin. Here with an explanation is one Ben Eyre, an undergraduate writing for the Oxford student paper: “Ricks examines songs under three categories: the seven deadly sins, the four cardinal virtues, and the three heavenly graces, which are variously resisted, and manifested, in his lyrics.”

Given that Bob Dylan once famously said of his own work, “It don’t mean nothing,” is there really a 500 page book’s worth of material to be wrestled from it? Ricks says yes to Charles McGrath at the Times, recalling his moment of epiphany, which occurred, shockingly, in 1968: “After dinner his host turned out the lights and put on 'Desolation Row’- a song bound to catch an English teacher’s attention since it has lines…about Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. 'Well, the depth of that,’ Ricks said. 'I thought those were wonderful. I thought those were great lines.’”

Speaking of great lines, a federal judge in Detroit ruled in favor of the endlessly controversial rapper Eminem last week, finding that the magazine The Source was out of order when it published some racist misogynistic juvenilia that Eminem had penned before becoming famous. “The Source has been held in contempt of court and ordered to pay Eminem’s legal fees for violating a court order by publishing the lyrics of two of the rapper’s early, racially charged songs,” reported Reuters on June 10.

The judge, Gerald Lynch, took the opportunity to do a little amateur musicology, calling Eminem “the most prominent of the handful of white hip-hop artists who have been artistically or commercially successful.” The judge sees the conflict between Eminem (real name: Marshall Mathers) and the Source endemic of the always-complex relationship between black music and white people in America. “Like other white musicians who have been successful in musical genres or forms pioneered by Africans or African-Americans…Mathers has been accused of exploiting black culture; he in turn has…maintained that he comes by his hip-hop success honestly, as a young man from a poor urban background who has long been associated with African-American friends, neighbors and mentors.”

No 500 page books yet available on Eminem’s visions of sin, but it’s just a matter of time.

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