The musical always begins with the same songs: "What Do You Do With a B.A. in English?" and that disillusioned anthem of a generation caught between what college promises and what the real world delivers, "It Sucks to Be Me."
But Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, who wrote the music and lyrics for "Avenue Q" with book by Jeff Whitty, say that even after an eight-year creative gestation, a 2004 Tony Award, a short-lived Las Vegas production and the launch of a national tour, every opening night of "Avenue Q" is, in a way, a brand-new show -- even though they finally called a moratorium on rewrites after the show went on the road.
In fact, Lopez had to choose between coming to Friday's opening-night performance at the Ahmanson Theatre and going to the Philippines for the bow of yet another production of "Avenue Q." "I am part Filipino, and I had to choose between here and Manila. I've never been there," he mused. "And it's like, how Filipino am I? It's like three-eighths, so I guess in the end, Hollywood won out. But I still may go out there. I'm this kind of weird racial miasma of things, I don't know what I am, so I kind of want to go there and see if I like it."
Even now, since most audience members don't know their faces, Lopez, 32, and Marx, 37, can watch their show in relative obscurity, as they did at the Ahmanson. But, Lopez says, he'll always be the guy who isn't laughing.
"I can't. I really can't," he said in a conversation at the obligatory pre-show dinner with theater donors -- chicken, thank-yous and enough wine to get him through his unprepared remarks. "I've seen the show so many times that I just can't see it as a show. I see it as a succession of written words and things that actors will screw up. When they do great things with it, I'm really happy, and when it's less than my memory, I berate myself."
For his part, Marx says he's the guy who's usually laughing when no one else is. "Every cast has different patterns and nuances," he observed backstage. "We're not laughing for the same reasons, because not only have we heard the joke a million times, we made up the joke. When I hear them invent new things, that's where the fun is for me."
Although "Avenue Q" is autobiographical -- both men found themselves living off their parents and trapped in low-level jobs in New York in their first years out of Yale University (Lopez) and the University of Michigan and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in Greenwich Village (Marx) -- it no longer sucks to be them.
