Avenue Q is a musical comedy featuring puppets and human actors with music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx and book by Jeff Whitty. It won Best Musical, Book, and Score at the 2004 Tony Awards. The show's format is a parody of PBS's Sesame Street, but its content involves adult-oriented themes. It has been praised for its approach to themes of racism, homosexuality and internet pornography. The musical premiered Off-Broadway in 2003 at the Vineyard Theatre, co-produced by the Vineyard Theatre and The New Group. In July of that same year the show moved to the John Golden Theatre on Broadway, where it ran until 2009, playing for over 2,500 performances. It then transferred to the off-Broadway New World Stages, where it played until 2019. Major productions have been staged in Las Vegas and the West End, and the musical has been staged and toured in several countries around the world. A school-friendly script has been produced. The principal cast includes four puppeteers and three human actors. The puppet characters, Princeton, Kate, Nicky, and others, are played by the unconcealed puppeteers as the costumed human actors interact with the puppets. Background and structure Avenue Qs cast consists of three human characters and eleven puppet characters who interact as if human, Sesame Street–style. The puppets are animated and voiced by puppeteers who are on stage, unconcealed. The puppet and human characters ignore the puppeteers, creating the illusion that the puppets are alive. To assist with the illusion, the puppeteers wear plain gray clothing in contrast to the human characters' colorful costumes. The same puppet may be operated by different puppeteers in different scenes, and the actor voicing the puppet may not be the one animating it. One puppeteer sometimes voices two or more puppets simultaneously. Conversely, the so-called "live-hands" puppets (see Puppets) require two puppeteers – again, in full view of the audience. The show draws inspiration from and imitates the format of children's educational television show Sesame Street. Marx interned at the program early in his career, and all four of the original cast's principal puppeteers – John Tartaglia, Stephanie D'Abruzzo, Jennifer Barnhart and Rick Lyon – were Sesame Street performers (D'Abruzzo returned to Sesame Street after leaving Avenue Q). Three of the puppet characters are direct recognizable parodies of Sesame Street puppets: Roommates Rod and Nicky are a riff on Bert and Ernie, while Trekkie Monster