It may have just posted closing notices on Broadway, but in London this graduate spin on Sesame Street is proving hard to kill. After the producers announced that it was to close in April — after two and a half years — ticket sales surged. So, after two months off, it’s moved theatres but kept the same cast, same puppets, same gently subversive take on twenty and thirtysomethings in Brooklyn trying to find their roles in life. But is Avenue Q really, as the posters claim in large letters, “pant-wettingly funny”? Well, it’s great fun, certainly. Clever, too. My pants, though, I must confess, stayed immaculate throughout.

The great trick of the show’s creators Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty is to conflate the syrupy sentiments of a Broadway musical, the loveability of furry puppets — whose operators are visible — with a sharper, dirtier tone than the Cookie Monster ever endured. Our graduate protagonist, Princeton, sets the tone with the plaintive What Do You Do with a BA in English? But it’s only when the cast launch into the genuinely surprising Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist that the show gets out of its semi-parodic comfort zone. What follows lives up to that promise only part of the time. Songs such as Mix Tape or There’s a Fine, Fine Line (“between love and a waste of time”) dish out the sort of romantic realism of which Jarvis Cocker would be proud. I Wish I Could Go Back to College nails the sense of feeling neither established nor awash with options any more. But, much as I chuckled at the sight of two infatuated puppets giving each other a good seeing-to, much as I admired the versatile six-strong cast, the show lacks a killer instinct. The Internet is for Porn, for example, struggles to add much to the joke of its title. The show’s final sentiment — “Everyone’s a little unsatisfied/Everyone goes around a little empty inside” — is a noble attempt at subverting bogus Broadway closure. But the tone is ultimately more Friends than South Park.

Avenue Q could do with another draft to bring all its strengths together — I know, I know, bit late for that now. You’d be hard pushed not to enjoy its energy and inventiveness. But spare pants are optional.

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