Director Jason Moore on bringing 'Avenue Q' back to the West End for its 20th anniversary

Director Jason Moore returns to his roots as the smash-hit musical Avenue Q lands back in the West End.

Summary

• Jason Moore is bringing Avenue Q back to the West End 20 years after its premiere
• The hit show features a gang of puppets trying to make ends meet in New York
• Famous songs from the show include "The Internet is for Porn" and "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist"

Avenue Q does have that first love quality to it,” says director Jason Moore, ahead of the musical’s return to the West End. “It was the first time I made something that a lot of people saw, and it gave me the confidence to keep going.”

The established film and theatre director, who went on to helm projects such as the Pitch Perfect movies, Shrek The Musical, and The Cher Show, and is set to direct the Murder, She Wrote reboot with Jamie Lee Curtis, started his romance with Avenue Q more than 20 years ago. The outrageously funny musical about a group of 20-something, foul-mouthed puppets trying to make ends meet in New York City began as a collection of songs destined for TV when Moore was brought on.

“When I heard the songs presented in a theatre workshop and saw the puppets, it was instantly magical. It was instantly hilarious. And it was instantly something I had never seen before,” he says. Moore realised the show had the potential to go beyond TV sketches, but didn’t know anything about puppetry, so he did a “crash course” with The Muppets and Sesame Street to understand how the idea could work on stage. He helped to craft the songs into a book musical, which premiered at the 149-seat Off-Broadway Vineyard Theatre in 2003.

Avenue Q is the definition of ‘the little show that could’. Like the characters in the musical, Moore and the writers Robert Lopez (who is behind Disney megahit Frozen), Jeff Marx, and Jeff Whitty were finding their way in the world and didn’t really have clear ambitions for the musical beyond its Off-Broadway run. “We were all frankly lucky to be working on our first show,” Moore says.

He recognises it could have been a challenge to find their audience. “It’s a bit confusing. You look at the show and see the puppets and think, ‘Is that for kids?’ But there’s puppet nudity — some of it is very naughty. It’s really a word-of-mouth show because it’s hard to explain.” The critics helped with that when the rave reviews came out; tickets became scarce, and it started to dawn on Moore that they had a hit on their hands.

Little did he know the scale of the success that would follow. Only months later, the musical opened on Broadway and was visited by former US president and fellow Arkansas native Bill Clinton (Moore’s father was his chief of staff), creating a huge publicity opportunity. It won three Tony Awards, including Best New Musical, before the bright lights of the West End beckoned in 2006. Now, 20 years after its London premiere, the show is back in town at the Shaftesbury Theatre.

How does it feel to return to the musical in London two decades on? “It’s a rare opportunity as a director to be able to look at a show you did the first time and figure out how it is still relevant,” he says. A key way of keeping in touch with changing times is by casting a whole new group of young actors to play the much-loved characters: Princeton, Kate Monster (who Moore identifies with the most for being both an optimist and a realist), Lucy the Slut, the Bad Idea Bears, Rod, Nicky, Trekkie Monster, and the rest of the Avenue Q gang.

Moore has been thrilled to see the way performers from the original run have thrived in the years that have followed. Indeed, Simon Lipkin is starring as Fagin in the Oliver! revival, while Jon Robyns plays Miss Trunchbull in Matilda The Musical and Giles Terera is just beginning performances in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at The Old Vic. But Moore was clear that they needed a new cast for the Avenue Q message to ring true; among its new faces are Cabaret’s Emily Benjamin, SIX’s Amelia Kinu Muus, and The Choir of Man’s Oliver Jacobson.

“We were all in our late 20s [when it was first written], and the show was about trying to find your way as an adult. In order to make that true for a London audience of young people trying to find their way in the world, it was important to have people on stage who reflected that.” He continues: “Avenue Q has some biting humour, but it has a lot of joy and optimism in it. Having young people who still feel all that optimism helps the show to be funnier.”

He recognises the challenge for these musical theatre professionals, who were not puppeteers before being cast. Interestingly, one of the key skills he looks for is actors who think and behave like directors. “They’re not inhabiting a character,” he says. “They’re expressing a character through their physicality. They’re saying, ‘I want to put the hand here. I want [the puppet] to look thoughtful by turning her head this way.’”

There are, however, some recognisable faces among the creative team. Julie Atherton originated the roles of Lucy the Slut and Kate Monster in the 2006 West End production and she returns as associate director, while Anna Louizos and Rick Lyon continue as set and puppet designers, respectively. A question on everybody’s lips is: have they changed the puppets? “They didn’t get facelifts, they didn’t shave their hair differently,” Moore reveals, keen to reassure fans.

Essentially the puppets will look the same because “they are meant to be timeless like the Muppets”. Yet it is clear there will still be plenty of surprise and delight moments. For starters, there will be more puppets, and fan favourite Lucy the Slut has grown legs in the years since the production closed at Wyndham’s Theatre. The outfits will be getting an upgrade to reflect where “everyone else is shopping, like H&M and Uniqlo”, and one of the characters will speak in slightly more modern slang. Another has been reinvented because the person they were based on is no longer in the public eye. Moore says that they have also revisited the set design, which hadn’t changed since the musical’s black-box, Off-Broadway beginnings.

“My goal with this production has been to make the original version connect with the young audience, and to give people who already love the show a sense of, ‘Oh, that is what I remember,’” Moore explains, continuing: “It’s the collision of the old and the new that’s exciting for everyone. It’s nice to be around comfort and old friends, but it’s much nicer to be challenged by new people.”

Moore believes that Avenue Q has helped to pave the way for other “underdog” productions because it proved that Broadway and West End audiences are also interested in more daring, transgressive content, citing shows such as The Book of Mormon (co-written by Lopez) and, more recently, Cole Escola’s historical farce Oh, Mary!. As he puts it: “People uptown always want to know what is happening downtown.”

While Avenue Q’s controversial comedy helped to put it on the theatrical map (its song list includes the numbers “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” and “The Internet is for Porn”), Moore says the musical’s “universal” and “timeless” themes of community, sexuality, love, and a search for purpose are what makes it resonate with audiences.

As for what it has taught him, Moore starts to get a bit emotional. “At a young age, it taught me that what I had to say was valuable, and that maybe I should stick with this career,” he says, pausing. “As a young artist, we need those guideposts — and this was a big guidepost.”

Book Avenue Q tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Jason Moore with the team in rehearsals. (Photo by Matt Crockett). Inset: Avenue Q in the West End (also Matt Crockett)

This article first appeared in the April 2026 issue of London Theatre Magazine.