Street Gang (61 page)

 

It’s hard to get fired from an unpaid internship, but Jeff Marx managed to do it during his term of service on
Sesame Street
in 1999. The story goes he wanted to write songs, not empty trash cans.

With this in mind, it would be logical to assume that the impulse to create an off-color musical satire of the series a year later, with rod puppets that look like second cousins of the Muppets who copulate onstage and sing of the virtues of Internet porn, was a vengeful act of disgruntled discards. But that explains nothing about the development of
Avenue Q,
the saltiest love letter ever sent to
Sesame Street,
penned by the clever songwriting team of Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez.

Avenue Q,
originally conceived as a television series, gestated into a stage musical after myriad workshop sessions, rewrites, and an off-Broadway run. It debuted on Broadway to raves in 2003 on the final Thursday of July. Ben Brantley’s review in the
Times
hailed the creators for demonstrating “that ambivalence, indecision, and low expectations can be the basis for a thoroughly infectious musical. . . . It is in its songs and performances that
Avenue Q
plays most piquantly on the contrasts between the world according to children’s television and the reality of adult life. The nature of the twinkly songs, unfailingly tuneful and disgustingly irresistible, can be deduced from their titles: ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist,’ “Schadenfreude,’ ‘The Internet Is for Porn,’ and ‘You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want (When You’re Makin’ Love).’ ”
²⁰

Stephanie D’Abruzzo joined the project when it was still in development. Craig Shemin, then a writer for the Jim Henson Company and D’Abruzzo’s husband of five years, recommended her to Marx and Lopez when they were searching for a singing female puppeteer to participate in an industry reading of their work in progress. By 2000, she was already a respected member of that circle of puppeteers who work on television projects in New York, including
Sesame Street.
“My first season of work on
Sesame Street
was the first year of Around the Corner,” she said. “I did plenty of background birds at the Furry Arms Hotel. If Michael Loman hadn’t come along—if they had simply maintained the status quo and only had the old characters and the old set—a new puppeteer would never have had the opportunity to perform. Around the Corner benefitted people like me.”

When she got involved with
Avenue Q,
D’Abruzzo was in the curious position of simultaneously being on
Sesame Street
and its parody. Complicating that, she was performing diametrically opposed puppets in
Avenue Q,
the commitment-seeking kindergarten teaching assistant Kate Monster and Lucy the Slut, a singer with a major bustline and intentions for Kate’s callow on-off boyfriend, Princeton. “The ingenue and the vamp,” D’Abruzzo said.

The characters were designed by Rick Lyon, who got bounced from a puppeteering job at
Sesame Street
and, like Marx, used parody as a balm for any wounded feelings. On his Web site, Lyon posed the central question asked by the
Avenue Q
creative team: “What if a cozy, familiar kids’ television show had to grow up? Not just the characters, but the subject matter, the songs, the attitude?”
²¹

The cast also included
Sesame Street
puppeteers John Tartaglia and Jennifer Barnhart. Tartaglia, like D’Abruzzo, did double duty, performing Princeton and Republican stockbroker Rod, a repressed homosexual in love with his roommate, Nicky, played by Lyon.

Avenue Q
won the 2004 Tony for best musical. D’Abruzzo, who was nominated for a best actress statuette, went on to do more than a thousand performances as Kate Monster.

People often tell her Jim Henson would have loved the show.

 

For season thirty, the Around the Corner set and sensibilities were abandoned, but ratings continued to erode for
Sesame Street
in the competitive environment of preschool television. At the same time, the mean age for the typical
Sesame Street
viewer was growing steadily younger.

In advance of a two-week workshop for producers and writers, an annual brainstorming event held before script assignments are handed out, executive producer Michael Loman called for ideas to refresh the show and solidify its core audience. “We were back into experimenting again,” said veteran writer Judy Freudberg. “We had gotten mandates from the front office saying our ratings were in trouble. So we started trying to come up with a different way to do the show, tossing ideas around. The idea was to change it without losing what we had.”

It seemed clear to the workshop attendees that the magazine format of establishing a street-based story at the top of the show and spacing out its development through the hour, with segments interrupting the narrative, was no longer ideal. The home-video boom of the 1980s and the explosion of new thirty-minute children’s shows on cable clearly demonstrated that a story well told could hold the attention of children under the age of five for ninety minutes or more.
²²

“We felt that the gap between street segments was too long, and the kids were losing the story line. At the same time, Elmo’s popularity had grown by leaps and bounds. I went home one afternoon and it just hit me: maybe we should do something
really
different.
Ally McBeal
was popular at that time, and it was so different than anything else on television. Thinking about that got me to wonder whether Elmo could have a segment that would be in an entirely different format. Maybe he could be the guide for the final fifteen to twenty minutes of the hour, the segment that audience research showed was the one in which kids were losing their way with the show. So, I brought that show-within-a-show idea with me during the final week of the workshop, thinking it would be killed. It was radical because we had never veered from that magazine mosaic and had never given any character more than another character to do.”

Far from being rejected, it was added to a list of possible ways to revamp the series. Attendees split into work groups, and Freudberg joined five others to imagine what an Elmo-centric concluding segment might include.
²³

Over the course of a few days, with the backing of the main group, the basic conceits and constructs of Elmo’s World evolved. They were refined over a month’s time, but a breakthrough moment occurred when writer-animator Mo Willems proposed that Elmo could exist within a computer-generated universe that would have a stream-of-consciousness feel to it, looking like a child’s squiggly crayon drawing come to life.

Not unlike the world inhabited by Pee-wee Herman in his sublime CBS Saturday morning series
Pee-wee’s Playhouse
(1986-91), the furniture and electronics within Elmo’s World would not be static. “They’d be stretchy and squashy,” Freudberg said. And so a toddling table and a window shade that would snap open to unveil a new character that was, in fact, a throw-back. For what was Mr. Noodle (played first by the late Michael Jeter, then later by Broadway actor Bill Irwin) if not a more Chaplinesque version of Buddy and Jim, the bumblers who tried to drive in a nail with a balloon? “Mr. Noodle, who never speaks, is all about trial and error,” Freudberg said. “When you throw him a hat, he acts like he’s never seen one before. Kids feel empowered watching him because they can do what he can’t.”

Baggy-pants Mr. Noodle—and his brother, Mr. Noodle—reflect the slapstick comedy of silent-film vaudeville. It is little wonder that Freudberg, with urging from writers Tony Geiss, Emily Kingsley, and Molly Boylan—found a way to pay homage to Jon Stone and Jim Henson by creating a character that would have made them laugh till they cried.

Epilogue

O
nce a month, Janet Wolf, Joan Cooney’s longtime executive assistant at Sesame Workshop, makes a lunch reservation for six at San Domenico on Central Park South. “When they answer, it’s always a solicitous ‘
Ohhhh,
a table for Miss Cooney. Yes, absolutely,’ ” Wolf says with a slight shake of her head. Sometimes, she notes, there are little reminders that behind the petite, polite, intellectually probing woman she has served so long “is a kind of command. Not that Donald Trump presence, like when you utter the name the world stops spinning, but when you do say ‘Joan Cooney is on the line,’ everyone always says, with a bit of reverence, ‘Oh, one moment, please.’ ”

The monthly “Ladies’ Lunch,” a tradition inaugurated by Leslie Stahl of CBS News, summons a sextet of some of New York’s most influential women in media.
Wall Street Journal
columnist Peggy Noonan, once a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, is a member of the group, as is
Good Morning America
coanchor Diane Sawyer,
Vanity Fair
correspondent Marie Brenner, and syndicated columnist Liz Smith. “I’d love to be a fly on
that
wall,” Wolf says.

Cooney, the smart sorority girl from Phoenix, arrives in tailored ensembles, flattering outfits that she wears for a season or two before donating to charity. A personal shopper at Saks Fifth Avenue makes choices based on her knowledge of Cooney’s taste, designer preference, favored fabrics and colors. Cooney will arrive at the department store precisely at 10:00 a.m., look things over, and decide. She is not one to fritter away time or dither. She reduces small matters, like what to order for lunch during her 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. workday. The routine borders on ritual. For years she ate the same noontime meal: a tiny cup of cold bow-tie pasta accompanied by an even tinier cup of fruit salad. She allows herself one cracker and a glass of iced tea. In recent years she has added a small piece of dark chocolate, at Wolf’s suggestion. “It’s supposed to be good for you, and who doesn’t like chocolate?” Wolf says.

Cooney keeps to her twice-weekly tennis dates and enjoys a set outdoors on summer weekends. She takes yoga classes, as well. At seventy-nine years old, she fairly radiates good health, the health of a cancer survivor who takes exquisite care of herself and those she loves.

Her office at One Lincoln Plaza is welcoming and drenched in diffuse natural light. As others have redecorated or refurnished at Sesame Workshop through the decades, Cooney has kept the same desk and credenza since 1969, an indication of her practicality and fiscal prudence.

Framed photographs, commendations, and mementos hang on the walls, a neat, asymmetrical arrangement of words and images that make a summary statement about her: she appreciates her life of privilege and position and the people who have walked with her, stride by stride.

In a corner near the far end of a table hangs the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to Cooney in 1995 by President Bill Clinton. It is the highest civilian award one can achieve in this country; and among the recipients have been civil-rights activist Rosa Parks (1996), Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (1993), baseball legend and humanitarian Roberto Clemente (posthumously in 2003), and author Harper Lee (2007). Unless you were looking for the medal in Cooney’s office, you could easily miss it.

Scattered about are dozens of
Sesame Street
plush toys and figurines, including characters not seen in the United States. There’s a small shrine to Jim Henson and a late-sixties conference-room photo of Cooney with founding producers Jon Stone, Dave Connell, and Sam Gibbon all sharing a laugh.

Near a conference table where Cooney receives guests is a collection of black-and-white photos of her grandchildren, a brood born to the children of Peter G. Peterson, her husband since 1980. Peterson came into her life after a period when she was not sure she would marry again. Tim Cooney was enough to cure anyone of marriage.

“When I came on as Joan’s assistant, she was very clear about something,” Wolf said one day, with a chuckle: “ ‘My ex-husband comes with the job.’ ”

Over time, despite his being occasionally abusive to her over the phone, Wolf showed concern and compassion for Tim Cooney. He had few visitors when he was hospitalized in 1999, but Wolf arrived to cheer him. Two days later he was dead at age sixty-nine. She attended a memorial for him at a saloon on Second Avenue. “People got up and spoke,” Wolf said. “I was there on Joan’s behalf; she certainly was not going to show up for
that.
I went and reported the whole thing back to her.”

 

In 2008, Peterson and Cooney moved into a grand apartment on Fifth Avenue that once belonged to Nelson Rockefeller. From their teak deck, one can see the expanse of Central Park to the west, lower Manhattan to the south, and deep into the uppermost reaches of Manhattan to the north.

Peterson recalled the early years of their marriage and “the ambivalence of children of divorce toward the
other woman.
Joan took more than she deserved of a kind of micro terrorism from my children, I guess you’d call it. They would go to great lengths to send her a message knowing that a certain piece of behavior would cause discomfort on her part, without being so explicit that it could be called rude. Before we got married, Joan used to have what she called ‘sinking spells.’ She had no children, and suddenly had to go from zero to five. And they were making life terribly difficult for her.

“Joan has [since] managed quite brilliantly to have achieved this wonderful nexus between family and friendship with the kids, without all of the psychological baggage of being their mother. So I think without exception the kids now adore her and they respect her enormously and feel very close to her. I call her the fairy stepmother.”

“The grandchildren have had no problems with me from the day they were born,” Cooney said, with a “thank goodness” glint in her eye. The older grandchildren call her “Joanie,” while the younger ones call her “Doe.” That came about after granddaughter Chloe, now twelve, tried to say “Joan” as a toddler and it came out “Doe.” That endearment got picked up by friends, and sometimes Peggy Noonan will address an e-mail to Cooney, “Dear Doe.”