Actors, puppets, world problems and modest neighbour pains, dreams and ambitions. All of  this in the same building, on the same street, depicted trough music. Avenue Q is an American musical for adults, which  is successfully  realised in Bulgaria at the beginning of 2017. That is the first time Bulgarian theatre approaches such a performance as the one directed by West Hyler and Petar Kaukov. Spectators see on stage not only the so called American dream, created by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, but  its whole  charm – with its positives and negatives.

The performance is an interesting experiment for the local public. It grabs you and takes you up so high as to enjoy all the beauties and troubles but  brings you back down  all  of a sudden, much faster than it has elevated you. Does it  detach you from your own life in order to show it to you in a better way? No, it rather makes you think about it on your own. It does not impose solutions to the problems it deals with. Just the other way round – everything serious is disguised by emotion and its best friends – laughter and tears. And that is why I dare call the performance an experiment. Avenue Q is unprecedented for the Bulgarian  audience, foreign but accomplished perfectly. The way that Avenue Q deals with individual and personal issues makes people pull back. Not many are  happy to look  into their own stories. The good news is that the musical is enveloped in joy, so it quickly becomes  the audience’s  favoruite.

The world depicted in the performance is similar to our own. It even imitates it. However, if we have to distinguish them, Avenue Q is a fairytale,  burdened  by not  so enchanting obstacles. Monsters and men are looking for solutions to problems that one usually avoids. Yes, Avenue Q deals with racism, with homosexuality and the attitude towards it, with passion and cheap love; as a whole, it  deals with everything we talk about , or rather keep quiet about, today. Still, the performance  handles this silence successfully. It seems forgotten and hidden into the melody. Why does music help us dissociate from things that embarrass us, perturb us and disturb our daily  lives? Because it is the way to break all the  walls between us. People communicate, touch, express, find and entertain themselves trough music. Music makes us forget the language we  speak, where we come from, the colour of  our skin… Music drags us into its own world, somewhere between the black musical notes and the white  stave, where the greatest feeling raises. In Avenue Q music is the one that gives energy to life. Music brings together men and monsters from different nationalities, with  different outlooks and views of  the world.  It  links them as a family, which  faces and solves its problems easily thanks to the melody.

With regard to the visual, Avenue Q  grips you immediately.  It’s like a very detailed map with many arrows pointing in different directions; the stage is colored, bright and multi-storeyed, exactly as a  block of flats. It opens its doors widely and welcomes its guests – the audience – warmly. But will the  audience respond to that hospitality?

While waiting to know the answer to this question, musical as a genre will  attract more and more  viewers,  as long as there are more attempts to popularization popularise it. Avenue Q is the first step  in that process. As the director, Petar Kaukov relates, “We dared to do something without knowing if people  out there will accept it.” Avenue Q’s authors mark a beginning with a lot of efforts and hard work. It is only a matter of time to  find out if the big  puppets from the show,  similar to the ones in Sesame Street, will continue to live together with the other puppets from the Sofia Puppet Theatre.

Translated by Guergana Damianova