Avenue Q

“Something's coming, something good,” sings the hero of Avenue Q, echoing somebody from a very different musical. When Tony sings the same words at the beginning of West Side Story's doomed love affair, they have a tragic quality. Coming from the protagonist of a show about the unglamorous recalibration of expectations that people go through in their 20s, they are merely ironic. Princeton is fresh out of college, just learning that life is downhill from here. “Something's coming, something meh,” might be more like it.

Princeton is a puppet, like half the cast of Avenue Q, the Sesame Street parody which began life on Broadway a decade ago. The formula is simple: where Sesame Street was positive, life-affirming, inclusive, Avenue Q invokes the same chirpy tone for cynicism and gloom. So the Bert and Ernie characters are gay (ie, gayer than Bert and Ernie), while the Trekkie Monster sings about porn. It's a lot of fun, with the tunes' saccharine banality—sung by a beaming young cast—gleefully undercut by their subject matter.

It's odd that Avenue Q is packing out one of Edinburgh's hugest venues, that it has achieved such success in the UK (it has toured incessantly since 2007). It targets a grown-up, cynical generation of Sesame Street viewers, and most of the people here seem to be either too old or too young to remember it. And too British – how many people in the UK even watched the programme? A mystery. Still, this version is just fine.