BYE BYE AVENUE Q LEAVES BROADWAY

Broadway’s ‘Avenue Q’ Follows Obama’s Marching Orders

by Stage Right

Back in February, my Big Hollywood colleague and super-funny-dude Tim Slagle wrote a series of posts on the Broadway musical “Avenue Q”. The show was going through a mini-crisis/publicity stunt because one of the big punch lines to the song “For Now” was no longer valid:

A song called “For Now” has the puppets reassure each other that most things in life are temporary, like hair and sex. Until recently, one of those temporary things was “George Bush.” Knowing that Obama was to be shortly inaugurated, the producers and writers were perplexed for a replacement. I know it should be obvious to everyone else, but Broadway producers don’t think like you and I. So they threw a contest to decide a better verse.

Two weeks later, Slagle followed up with the big announcement of the new lyric:

So what did they decide to use? The winning lyric is: ”George Bush WAS only for now.” Brilliant. I guess like “South Pacific” and “Bye-Bye Birdie,” some vintage musical theater is better when presented in the time frame that it was originally written. “Avenue Q” will now be forever remembered as a Bush-era production, although the impact has noticeably waned. ”We now know that although George Bush’s presidency was only for now,” show creator, Robert Lopez noted, ”the comic potential of ‘George Bush’ seems like it may last forever.”

Not so fast. This week, “Avenue Q” did something that Broadway shows rarely do. They closed their production and re-located to an Off-Broadway house. During the process of re-opening the show in a smaller venue, the writers took the time to really give some thought to the “George Bush WAS for now” lyric and they have finally found their perfect replacement.

It seems that the real purpose of this line is not to get a huge laugh. No, it seems that the real purpose is to find the worst possible, evil, racist, homo-phobic, war-mongering, lying, right-wing boogie man and insert their name into the lyric to ridicule and diminish them. Circa 2004 that person was President Bush. Today, the only person that fits that description is, well, not really a person at all. You see, the writers of “Avenue Q” have apparently been paying very close attention to the White House’s latest full-court press against… the press! The new lyric is:

“Fox News is only for now.”

I’m waiting for you to stop the hysterical laughter and applause at this brilliant, Sondheim-like lyric.

Fox News, the highest rated news outlet for over a decade. Fox News, the network whose 3 AM show out-ranks CNN’s prime time fare. Fox News is only “for now.” But “Avenue Q” is forever. Uh, huh. I expect that Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly will be reporting on the tenth anniversary of “Avenue Q”’s closing.

Let’s face it folks, after having to close its Tony Award-winning production on Broadway, revamping the financial structure of the show, begging the actors’ union to allow them to reduce the performers’ salaries (which the spineless union allowed) and moving to a theatre half the size of the tiny little Golden which housed the show for the last five years, I think it is clear that “Avenue Q” is only for now…. BARELY!