This is a kind of X-rated Sesame Street with a hint of Friends, featuring puppet characters such as Lucy the Slut and Mrs Thistletwat. It’s brash, vulgar, puerile, sometimes downright obscene, and I loved every minute of it.

It comes to us straight from Broadway, boasting a Tony, and it’s not hard to see why. Extremely original and hugely entertaining, it’s also rather more emotionally involving than you might expect. Its mischievous creators, Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, have acknowledged their debt to Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But while the antics of the South Park boys might make you snigger, you hardly feel any great sorrow when Kenny gets killed (yet again). In Avenue Q, though, there are not only bad-taste giggles, but real-life struggles. The fate of Kate Monster, the sweet, wide-eyed, lank-haired kindergarten teacher at the heart of the story, really begins to matter to you. Will she end up happily with Princeton, or will he be led astray by the more obvious but superficial charms of Lucy the Slut? Avenue Q is a street of crumbling New York brownstones a long way from Manhattan, inhabited by a variety of twentysomething losers, all more or less broke, lovelorn and lonely. The puppets are life-size, but exist only from the waist up (though this doesn’t save them from a rich array of psychosexual neuroses). Their puppeteers carry them around the stage on their arms, voicing and singing as they go. Initially, this threatens to be a distraction, but then something strange happens: you stop watching the puppeteers as your attention becomes riveted by the trials and tribulations of these soulful, goggle-eyed, all-too-human puppets. Mere bundles of fluff and fur they may be, but they remind you to a spooky degree of people you know. There’s the red-eyed Trekkie Monster, who spends rather too much time “on the internet”. There’s Rod the investment banker, who has issues with his sexuality, protesting rather too much that he has a girlfriend in Canada: “She lives in Vancouver and sucks like a Hoover!” There’s the wonderful Ann Harada as the world’s most useless therapist, Christmas Eve. And there’s Kate and Princeton, and their on-off relationship. When they finally get it together, after a few too many absinthe daiquiris, it’s a revelation just how rude the sight of a couple of glove puppets going at it hammer and tongues can be.

The live band is spot-on, the puppeteers are outstanding, especially Julie Atherton, and Simon Lipkin and Jon Robyns provide a fantastic range of silly voices. Above all, it’s the songs that are so liberatingly offensive, from Trekkie Monster’s personal anthem, “The internet is for porn!”, to the sublimely jolly “Everyone’s a little bit racist sometimes, doesn’t mean we go around committing hate crimes”.

This is the best thing with puppets since Shockheaded Peter. I predict a Kate Monster hit. Five stars Christopher Hart

Eh Joe
Duke of York’s

This must be the greatest half-hour in theatrical history: a Beckett television piece translated by the film director Atom Egoyan into something resembling a living Rembrandt, or a real-time Bill Viola video. An ageing man sits alone on a single bed while a woman’s voice assails him inside his head. The walls become a screen onto which is projected the man’s creased but sensual face, in a gradually intensifying close-up. His lips quiver, the bags under his eyes fill and empty as her narrative drives home his guilt and fear of death. The voice is Penelope Wilton’s, the face Michael Gambon’s. The great Gambon says nothing, and gives the performance of his life. Five stars Robert Hewison

Evita
Adelphi

There is something strangely tentative about Michael Grandage’s fitfully brilliant revival of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1978 collaborative swan song. The band in the pit seems too small to raise the roof when occasion demands (and it does). Christopher Oram’s drab design and insufficiently varied staging seems complacent about its Buenos Airean accuracy, as if research had been deemed more important than spectacle (Hal Prince’s original may have been cold and brash, but it was bold). Only Paule Constable’s superb lighting and Rob Ashford’s electrifying choreography hit the spot. The inclusion of You Must Love Me, the song written for the Madonna film, is commercially understandable, but dramatically it breaches the unspoken deal between writers and audience: that Eva Peron’s tragedy will always be paired with her monstrosity. Only in this duality can Evita be palatable. Matt Rawle, as Che, has a clear voice, but he lacks the bitterness that gives this character his bite. The evening belongs to the tiny but big-lunged Argentinian Elena Roger, who zooms through with more than “just a little touch of star quality”. Misgivings about the production, then, but the work itself must surely now be regarded as a masterpiece of British 20th-century musical theatre. Three stars Dan Cairns

On The Third Day
New Ambassadors

A theatre critic who watches too much television isn’t doing the job, so I have missed The Play’s the Thing, a TV series in which a first-time writer’s unperformed play gets a West End opening. The question now is, is it any good? Kate Betts brings us something that reality-trapped television drama rarely risks, though when a character explains he is Jesus, Dennis Potter springs to mind. The music and doomy projections add a theatricality unavailable on the box.

The theme of sibling guilt — the father’s death, the incestuous attraction between brother and sister — seems edgy enough, but to make the brother a caver and the sister a stargazer shows the clunking thought behind it. To have their relationship apparently resolved by a returned Christ, in a scene recalling Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, pushes suspension of disbelief, as does the opening premise that a 30-year-old virgin would invite a stranger back to her flat for sex. The principals, Maxine Peake, Tom McKay, as the angry brother, and Paul Hilton, as the Jesus figure, are good, and the visuals work, but essentially this “hard” subject is given a soft centre. As you expect to see in the West End. Three stars Robert Hewison