Smackin’ the Q Ball

New theater season breaks with Wynn-snagged Avenue Q

Steve Bornfeld

Any way you parse the alphabet, this fall's theatrical A-B-C's spell Avenue Q.


The Tony-winning Broadway titan with the R-rated puppets opens officially this week at Wynn Las Vegas (see review, page 65), which is fast becoming Broadway's left-coast branch office, with plans to also accommodate current smash Spamalot in 2007.


Be advised: Q addresses, among other topics, screwing, boozing and Internet-surfing porn-searching (as in the number, "The Internet Is For Porn"). An extra, added bonus: Q features "full puppet nudity including graphic simulated sex between puppets."


But they're so damned adorable.


As always though, theater is most plentiful—if not always well-attended or appreciated—in the local enclaves around town. Here's a quick-hit tour:


If singing presidential slayers be your cup of rat poison, Stephen Sondheim's unconventional (to say the least) Assassins—a five-time Tony-winner last season, including for Best Revival—blasts into Vegas via Stage Door Entertainment. (Now through September 18, see review, page 64).


Backed by a Gilbert and Sullivan score, the Stage Door Youth Players explore The Wind in the Willows (now through September 17), "a musical adventure that explores the power and value of friendship and the lasting effects of kindness." We're all for that.


Jewish parents ... their Jewish daughter ... her not-so-Jewish-bogus-actor-boyfriend. Oy vey! Let the tzsoris begin! It's Las Vegas Little Theatre's Beau Jest (opens September 9). And its sequel, Jest a Second, bookends the season in May. Oy gevalt!


Nervous breakdowns, ghosts and murder haunt a remote farmhouse when Theatre in the Valley stages Peter Colley's psychological thriller, I'll Be Back Before Midnight (opens September 15).


Writer-director Joseph Bernard's play, as performed by the Empress Theater Company, seems like it could be the motto of either mainstream Hollywood or the increasingly mainstream porn industry: Take Off Your Clothes and I'll Make You a Star (opens September 15). It hasn't worked out that way for us here at the Weekly, no matter how often we show up at the office naked, but we wish Empress better luck.


The night-owl Insomniac Project at LVLT launches a new season with Late Night Confessions (opens September 16), a series of short comic plays with titles such as Lewd Loves of a Lusty Laundress and Eat Your Cheerios, Jesus. Of course, it's open to the Coco Puffs crowd, too.


Opening the same night (September 16) at LVLT's smaller Fischer Black Box Theatre is A.R. Gurney's Ancestral Voices, a tender, humorous look at the life of one family in the '30s and '40s.


The roving, radical (and pretty damned good) Cockroach Theatre troupe inflicts playwright Richard Foreman's existential, philosophical (and deeply strange) Permanent Brain Damage on risk-taking theatergoers (opens September 18).


Sisterly love and laughs propel Beth Henley's Pulitzer-winner Crimes of the Heart at UNLV (opens September 23) during a reunion of three siblings down Mississippi way.


The count with the suckage addiction is bored to (un)death and retiring—which is why you should attend Dracula's Audition (opens September 30), a musical comedy at New City Theatre in which Mr. Fangs searches for his replacement.


Even in the throes of death, the about-to-shutter Nevada Theatre Company will celebrate the life of Las Vegas in two original plays, Founding Vegas: The Centennial Show and Three Ways Home: Nevada Becomes a State (opens October 8). Beyond the public performance, NTC's troupers will tour schools with the show through November 18.


Though it has yet to be announced, a new season of touring Broadway productions (opening play likely to be in October) is expected at Cashman Theatre.


Ernest Hemmings, late of the now-defunct SEAT theater, goes collegiate when he directs Anna in the Tropics (opens October 14) at the Community College of Southern Nevada's Cheyenne campus. Nilo Cruz's 2003 Pulitzer-winner is a romantic drama of love and marital infidelity set in a Cuban-American cigar factory in 1929 Tampa.


For a perfect Vegas fit, take in UNLV's The Gamester (opens October 16), Freyda Thomas' comic tale of a woman who forces her lover to choose between her and his gambling habit.


There's much ado about something when the Arkansas Repertory Theatre performs Much Ado About Nothing at the Henderson Pavilion as the centerpiece of the 19th annual Shakespeare in the Park festival (October 21-23).


How suite it is—London Suite, Neil Simon's quartet of zinger-laden vignettes, including a sorta sequel to his original megaresort of merriment, California Suite, comes courtesy of the impeccable hotel staff at LVLT (opens November 4).


Here's how reviewer Thomas Burke summed up Charles Busch's The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, on the docket for Theatre in the Valley (opens November 10): "A play about a middle-aged, wannabe intellectual, upper-West Side matron named Marjorie whose midlife crisis is defined by her generation's pantheon of avant-garde philosophical superstars, with an emphasis on Oriental mysticism, spiritual alienation and Siddhartha." Ooooookay.


Linguistic laughs abound in UNLV's The Foreigner (opens November 11), Larry Shue's tale of a bunch of unsavory characters dealing with a stranger they think doesn't understand English.


For an ancient playwright, Aristophanes is as relevant as today's news out of Iraq. And his Lysistrata at CCSN (opens November 11) still offers an intriguing solution to the terror of war: The title character enlists women to withhold, well, the goods (to put it delicately) from their hubbies to end 20 years of combat. It's a comedy, though men may be hard-pressed to find the humor.


All in all, a promising autumn of theatrical culture.


Cue the humping puppets.

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