As news of the death of Gary Coleman at a Utah hospital yesterday afternoon lit up Twitter, many of those tweeting wondered how the actor’s death would affect the popular Broadway show Avenue Q.
“Gary Coleman” is a central character in the production, introduced in an ensemble song called “It Sucks To Be Me.” The main characters all argue, in a song, about how it “sucks to be” them. Coleman’s character, played by a woman, introduces himself and all the characters rapidly agree his life “sucks” the worst.
As Coleman fell ill Wednesday and died Friday, the show’s creators struggled with the character’s future in the popular musical. Jokes made at Coleman’s expense, they felt, might come off as crass or unfeeling. Creator Jeff Whitty says removing the character altogether was discussed, but in the end, they decided to cut little from the show:
Mr. Whitty said he feared that the jokes in “Avenue Q” about Mr. Coleman’s career and financial troubles would now seem offensive. “The question came up for me,” he said, “so do we bring in a new character?”
Instead, the creators decided to make small changes throughout, some of them crafted backstage in midperformance. (A line in which the Coleman character refers to himself as a “former child star” became simply “child star.”)
“We probably cut 20 words out of 1 million from the show tonight,” Mr. Whitty said.
Danielle K. Thomas, who played Coleman first on Broadway and now off-Broadway, says she was initially very nervous about going on stage as Coleman after his death, but the audience was appreciative:
But the audience clapped and cheered enthusiastically for her, and laughed through numbers like “Schadenfreude” (in which Coleman sings that the world needs people like himself “Who’ve been knocked around by fate’/’Cause when people see us, they don’t want to be us”) and “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”(in which he admits he enjoys jokes about Polish people).
“That is the style of ‘Avenue Q,’ ” Ms. Thomas said, “to slap you in the face to the point where nothing offends you and everything becomes O.K.”
Below is a clip of the show’s song “It Sucks To Be Me.”
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