CULTURE | THEATER
From Sesame Street to Skid Row For its offbeat preseason show, Lake City Playhouse is reexamining the puppet-taught life lessons of childhood BY E.J. IANNELLI
The cast of Avenue Q (and their human controllers) at Lake City Playhouse. MATT WEIGAND PHOTOS
M
ost American adults under the age of 40 will have distinct childhood memories of Sesame Street. That’s because, thanks to its sketchbased mix of Muppetry, mirth and music, the show quickly established itself as consummate edification through entertainment after it first aired in 1969. The lessons of Sesame Street are consequently familiar
ones to several generations of parents and their children. There are the educational variety, such as phonetics, spelling and basic math; and then there are the moral variety, which stress acceptance, self-esteem, empathy and altruism. Trouble is, once you leave the tame world of Sesame Street, where even the urban air is noticeably sweet,
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those life lessons aren’t always easy to put into practice. For Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, the gap between the real world and the controlled positivity embodied by Sesame Street resulted in a sense of disillusionment that they found hard to reconcile. Along with playwright Jeff Whitty, they channeled that disillusionment into Avenue Q, a stage musical that parodies and pays homage to the
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