When Avenue Q, the long-running puppet musical comedy, opened on Broadway in 2003, there were no such things as Twitter, Instagram or Google+. Mark Zuckerberg hadn't even founded Facebook yet. We were well into the online age -- one of the show's most popular tunes has always been "The Internet Is For Porn" -- but social networking had not yet made, so to speak, its Broadway debut.
Avenue Q won Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Book and Best Score and ran for six years, then transferred to its current Off-Broadway home at New World Stages, where it will mark its 2,000th performance next month.
To celebrate the show's 11th anniversary and its continued success in the Time of the Tweet, producers have designated a special performance on July 31 as "The Internet Is For Q!," during which audience members are encouraged to leave their mobile devices on and "post their experiences during the show on their mobile phones via Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Facebook, etc."
All seats for the performance will cost only $11.
Sounds fun, chaotic, or both. Also sounds like a clever marketing gimmick. If active Tweeters, Instagrammers and Facebookers occupy even half the theater's 499 seats, those 250 people will reach thousands of friends (or "friends") with their posts, reminding digital denizens far and wide that Avenue Q is still alive and kicking.
The show continues to resonate with audiences because of the sheer fun of its songs and puppetry, but also because of its story of 20-somethings who've moved to New York City to follow their dreams. That's a tale that's been playing out in real life, and consequently being told in one form or another, for a century or more. It's the story of Rent, the story of Bullets Over Broadway, the story of countless films from Hollywood's golden era.
The whole concept of a special social-networking performance shows that today's Internet is less "for porn" than it is for virtual socializing and sharing. So is Avenue Q's depiction of an actual street where neighbors socialize and squabble in person more nostalgic than realistic? If so, what better place for it than a big stage in the Big Apple in the 21st century, where stories of past eras reign supreme?
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