Five days: Montreal, Boston, NYC; seven customers, two friends, and one Broadway show. The non-business part of the trip was breakfast with Greg Costikyan, long haired and shy-eyed. He speaks, passionately and precisely, in well-structured sentences, whether about his daughters, the World Trade Center attacks, the history of board gaming, or his published works. His apartment walls are covered with shelves and shelves of paperback sci-fi books, and his three cats dance and paw and shed happily about his game-filled apartment.
Doug Katsaros met me for a couple beers and some mac-and-cheese. We did our respective post mortems of The End and he talked about his new project. Broadway productions of well-established musical acts are all the rage… Queen, Billy Joel, ABBA, etc. Doug is working on a Doors cover band for a stage show.
I sprang for the double-price tickets for Avenue Q. It’s the musical with the ur-Muppets who sing four-letter words. I love Muppets and I love four-letter words, and so it was a shoo-in for me. The plot was surprisingly old-school: despite the wacky references to gay love, masturbation and racism, the two-plot story involves two star-crossed couples whose lives are in turmoil by the end of Act One. (Bert and Ernie are one of the couples.) It’ll be in Vegas eventually, so check it out when it settles there.
A few years before they wrote Avenue Q, Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx wrote a musical screenplay called Kermit, Prince of Denmark. Henson Productions turned them down flat. Now that Avenue Q won a Tony, the screenplay is being reconsidered by Henson. Oh, the irony!
I’ve seen Avenue Q twice now (many thanks to our mutual friend Alvin). It’s fun, I love it, but if you’ve heard the soundtrack then the stage production will offer few surprises. The surprises it DOES offer, though, are phenomenally funny.