Day Thirty - Avenue Q

This morning I moved into a really nice apartment in Notting Hill where I'm staying with two nice guys - Nick and Joshua - who are friends of my mum. "What mischief has your mother been up to lately Guy?" asked both of them on separate occasions. The answer is "I don't want to know!"

After a very quick hello and thanks for having me (too quick - I felt bad!) I headed into town to meet Trigg for our planned day of fun. A hot date basically.

First on the agenda was Camden Markets. Quite funky and sleazy kind of area with mostly clothes and accessories for sale. Lots of shops had large selections of colourful bongs for sale which I was surprised at. What really surprised me was that all of the shops had signs up saying 'NO PHOTO' and the shop keepers were very strict about this. They were spring out of nowhere to stop you taking a picture. The first time this happened (when I hadn't seen the sign) an Asian woman yelled at me 'No Photo! Five Pound!' and then tried to convince me that everyone pays £5 to take photos of her stall. I later learned that the reason for all of this is to stop people from stealing eachothers designs. I understand the idea for a vintage store, maaayyybe, but this woman's stall had exactly the same stuff as everybody else in the market! Silly Billys.


No photo...£5!


A selection of the kind of T-shirts for sale. My favourite was the one that said in block capitals 'NOBODY KNOWS I'M A LESBIAN'.


Food. People fight to give you free samples.

After naughtily taking photos everywhere and watching the reactions of the shop keepers (at one store called 'Cyber Dog' which had thumping drum'n'bass and futuristic neon clothes for sale I had several shop keepers come at me - It was like being approached by irobots) we then caught the underground to White City (racist) and went to a gigantic amazing supercool Westfield shopping mall. Way better than in NZ. Very spacious, and they had these cool touch screen displays around that you could search what you wanted to buy in the mall and it would tell you where to go. There was even a real Apple store there. I had a party!


Westfield White City. Nice.


Trigg shouted me a 'Snakebite' - apparently a famous drink for NZers and Aussies when overseas - at this Australian bar called The Walkabout before heading to Avenue Q!

Avenue Q was brilliant! It's like an x-rated adult version of Sesame St with puppets (and people) with songs like Everyone's A Little Bit Racist, It Sucks To Be Me (What do you do with a B.A. in English), The Internet Is For Porn, and You Can Be As Loud As The Hell You Want (When you're makin' love).


The Noel Coward Theatre.


I had listened to the music quite a lot before, so the shock factor of the lyrics didn't make me burst into laughter like most of the audience, but it was still brilliant.


It seems that Fixed Point is very important with puppetry. When it is clear where the puppet is looking suddenly its eyes seem to come alive. It's important for the actors around the puppet to assist with the fixed point as well. e.g. Look where the puppet is looking, or in the eyes of the puppet (and not the actor controlling the puppet).


My favourite: The Bad Idea Bears. "Take her home! She's wasted!" The coolest bits for me were the bits I hadn't heard about in the soundtrack. Like when two TV screens lower to play Sesame St-esque educational animations. E.g. A silhouette of a man says "Come" and then a silhouette of a woman says "Mittment" and then an argument ensues, leading to the words joining and voila! "Committment". Very funny.


It was great when the actor controlling the puppet really animated their faces and bodys at the same time as the puppets'. This helps give the puppet more expression than it would have without the puppeteer. Some thing else I found interesting was that the three actors in this production who only played humans (Gary Coleman, Brian and Christmas Eve) were not as good as the puppets. We didn't love them nearly as much. And I think we could have loved them if they had lifted their level of energy to that of the puppets. They were bigger than naturalistic, but not as big as the puppets, and so they didn't really fit in.

Overall I absolutely loved the show and would recommend it to anybody. Well, maybe not the kids.


Afterwards we went back to The Walkabout which had turned into a dance party. We met up with a guy from NZ who Trigg had directed in Niu Sila at Wellington College last year. Really nice guy. I have a student card so we got £1.50 drinks which was not bad. But we tired of the place very quickly. It's basically The Big Kumara of Leicester Square. So we left and everywhere was closing so had a dance on the street to this guy busking with make-shift drums. Then went to KFC for a midnight snackbox. And as we were looking at the menu these two guys from Austria called us over and said they'd bought a bucket but couldn't handle it so we could have the rest! So we sat and chatted to these guys whilst eating their chicken.


Thomas and Stefan from Austria. The Hills Are Alive...