Avenue Q

Adulthood is horrible in every way, save for the refuge of cursing and self abuse. So says Avenue Q (music and lyrics by creators Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx; book by Jeff Whitty), except funnier. Now at the Box Theater, director Kevin Fitzhenry leads a talented cast and their bevy of puppets appendages-deep into an unsanctioned (and for good reason) parody of a beloved children’s television show, teaching young adults about the many ways in which life after college completely sucks.

First and foremost, it wouldn’t be Shmesshamee Shmeet without puppets, and designer Mark Konwinski deserves accolades for making the felt and fur fly in this supremely appointed production. At the center of the story is Princeton (Eric Niece), fresh from college and unable to conceive of a world in which New York City isn’t lavishly draping opportunities at his feet. Short on income, he follows the alphabetical Manhattan streets down, getting all the way to Q before finding a sufficiently cheap dump for the misbegotten. There he meets plenty of other deferred dreamers, colorful characters with problems that form teaching moments: pretty, single Kate Monster (Andrea Thibodeau) is fed up with anti-monster prejudice and wants to open a school especially for her kind; whereas roommates Rod (Niece again) and Nicky (Steve Xander Carson) have a question mark hanging over their hetero best friendship. Overall, the puppeteer-actors strike a fine balance between creating believable entities and developing empathetic characters. Niece makes for a winning leading man, carrying two major roles with staggering ease and winning the viewer over with expressive singing. A solid vocalist with fine timing, Thibodeau’s best work is as the uninhibited jiggly cabaret singer Lucy; her Kate declines to heighten the expected beats of a neurotic romantic lead. Great vocal range and mimicry only accounts for half of Carson’s impressively familiar-sounding performance, paired with puppet mastery in an amazing partnership with Tim Stone. Whether in tandem work on the same puppet or as a duo of bad-influence bears, they make it easy to forget the black-clad actors supplying these expressive voices and movements — some of which, it must be reiterated, are not remotely appropriate for younger ears and eyes.

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Driving Miss Daisy

Agitating and preaching are effective means of persuasion, but few devices invite receptiveness to the message like a simple feel-good story. With its blameless yet pointed look at racism and intolerance in the mid-twentieth-century American South, playwright Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy is engineered to have few detractors. In the current production at the Box Theater, resident company What’s That Smell? and director John Forlini use the odd-couple pairing of a white woman and a black man to deliver themes of big importance on a small scale.

As in the Academy Award–winning film it inspired, the play justly traces the begrudging professional (and creeping personal) relationship of elderly Daisy (Connie Cowper), an insistently self-sufficient Atlanta widow, and obsequious Hoke (Orson Wingo), the patient and eminently diplomatic black man hired to be her chauffer. Through a series of targeted vignettes stretching from shortly after World War II through the civil rights era, each inadvertently challenges and changes the other, but with gentle comedy and tender regard that keeps the show’s ninety minutes agreeable instead of severe. As Daisy’s enterprising and upwardly mobile son (and Hoke’s employer), Mark Konwinski serves as a necessary dramatic and comic foil, a representative of the younger generation against which his mother’s changing views are measured.

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