“There is life outside your apartment”
Valerie Loftus chats with Katharine Moraz, star of the Tony Award winning musical Avenue Q
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unny, fluffy, and just a little bit rude – what am I talking about? Avenue Q, of course, the side-splitting, Tony Award-winning Broadway musical that combines lovable puppets and real-life performers. Fresh out of college, Princeton moves to downbeat Avenue Q where he meets a host of colourful and crude characters. Princeton has to find his way in the real world while trying to answer the burning question: what do you do with a BA in English? Avenue Q rolls into the Bord Gais Energy Theatre (formerly Grand Canal Theatre) in April, but I caught up with one of the stars of the show, Katharine Moraz, to find out more.
Can you tell us a bit about your characters?
“I play two characters in the musical – Kate Monster and Lucy the Slut. Kate Monster is very sweet; she’s a kindergarten teaching assistant who lives on Avenue Q. She meets Princeton and they start to go out and fall in love. Then I also play Lucy the Slut, who is exactly what her name suggests! She’s a nightclub singer, and likes to get her claws into any man she can find. They’re very different characters, but very fun to play.” A lot of people have been wondering: how do you do a musical with puppets?
“Oh, I don’t know! The reason
Avenue Q is so good is because of the puppets. They’re very racy and rude, but because they’re so naïve, they get away with it. As for the technical aspects of it, you have to learn the basics with our puppet coach Nigel Plaskett –he’s like a puppet legend! He worked with The Muppets and Sesame Street. It is difficult when you start because you have a whole other person on your arm, and you have to think about all the normal things you do in a musical and put it all into the puppet and make it part of you. But after a while, things become second nature.” Have you ever had any puppetrelated slip ups on stage?
“There are slight things that go wrong from time to time – all the puppeteers have to voice at least two puppets each, and there
Literary Death Match Emma-Louise Hutchinson catches up with the creator of the series before its return to Dublin this month
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ushing a TV show in LA, mingling with comedians, actors and musicians, and nights spent hosting events in over 40 cities all over the world it might not sound like the life of your average writer but it’s all in a day’s work for Literary Death Match creator Todd Zuniga. After the idea was born over sushi in New York, Zuniga explains, he and his co-creators started the event because they wanted to figure out a way to make reading fun and address the problems they saw at events in New York at the time; lazy writers, those with no concept of
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time limits, and the odd mix of comedy and literature. And so Literary Death Match was born. For the unfamiliar, the premise is simple; four writers, three judges, two rounds and one game show style finale. The writers read their own work for seven minutes or less (those going over this are often shot with Nerf guns), are judged on literary merit, performance and intangibles by anyone from comedians to musician Moby, and two are chosen to progress to the Death Match finale. The premise may be simple but the proceedings are some-
times less so. The Death Matches can be anything from Pin the Mustache on Hemingway to a Literary Spelling Bee and don’t always go to plan. One of the event’s biggest disasters involved a remote control helicopter, a lost rotor and sudden change of task. “They [the finalists] had to fly the helicopter and try to land it on a book while the other finalist was shooting a Nerf dart gun... to try to shoot down the helicopter, and the person who got it closest to the book was gonna win. But after the first person did it, they got shot down so it crashed the copter and
are points in the show where I have to talk to myself as two different characters. You have to be aware of who you’re playing now and who you’re talking to! Sometimes your heart skips a beat and you think “Am I doing the right thing? Am I saying the right line with the right puppet?” You have to stay on your toes.” What’s your favourite song to perform?
“Personally, I love ‘There’s a Fine, Fine Line’, which I perform at the end of Act 1. It’s a real heartbreak song. But there are so many – I love listening to ‘Schadenfreude’ and doing ‘You Can Be As Loud As The Hell You Want’, because they’re such catchy tunes.”
you ever have to update the references to make the musical more current?
“We do, actually. It first came to London seven years ago, so there are changes in references to politics – towards the end, they used to reference George Bush. Obviously now he’s not in office it doesn’t have the same effect. Generally, we don’t have to change too much at all, just one or two lines here and there to keep up to date. Otherwise, it’s about very universal things that everybody goes through; relationships, sexuality, and racism. The core issues are always the same.”
There are lots of cultural references in the musical – do
Avenue Q comes to the BordGais Energy Theatre on Tuesday the 3rd of April 2012. Tickets start at €20 and are on sale now through Ticketmaster.
then the tail rotor of the copter just went missing… we had to change the finale to where they had to just shoot my friend in the head from a distance with the Nerf machine gun, which was way sadder and less celebratory, but still pretty funny.” Zuniga says seamlessly integrating comedy was one of the main challenges his team faced. The finales may seem the obvious place to fit it in, for good reason, but Todd targetted the judges, their commentary and their jokes. “Having the judges in the event, that was a perfect way for us to integrate the comedy because the judges are reacting to the stories themselves,” he said. On the decision to include judges from outside the literary world, Zuniga explained: “Getting an actor that people know from a TV show or getting a comedian who’s going to really sew it all together or getting a
chef who’s going to comment on the work as a recipe as opposed to, you know, a literary person might, I think that just makes it fun and it makes it surprising and I think people leave the house for two reasons. I think they leave the house to be surprised and to make out with someone and so, we try to offer up both opportunities I guess.” Not content to simply tour all over the world (the event just graced its 40th city and made its first appearances in Scandinavia), Zuniga moved to LA only ten weeks ago and is hoping to turn the event into a TV show. They already have an agent and almost got a TV option so we may see the show on our screens in the near future. For now though, you’ll have to settle for seeing the show when it returns to The Workman’s Club on March 28th. Tickets cost €7 on pre-order and €10 on the door. Flux | March 21, 2012