Nudity! Sex! Literary Chimps! Lady Day! City Repertory Theatre Readies New Season With Reboots

Nudity and sex will be taking center stage when City Repertory Theatre opens its 15^th season on Sept. 19 at its black box venue in Palm Coast.

More precisely, nudity and sex will be taking center stage again at City Rep, when the cutting-edge, never-hesitant-to-be provocative community theater brings back the characters Princeton and Kate Monster, and – in full (frontal) view of the audience – they proceed to engage in boisterous, noisy coitus.

OK, Princeton and Kate are actually puppets – yes, puppets – which is the telling detail that the play in question is the 2003 Tony Award-winning musical “Avenue Q,” which CRT first staged in 2014.

For City Rep’s upcoming 15^th season, seven of the eight scheduled plays will be reprises of past productions. Along with “Avenue Q,” they include:

• Mark Brown’s 2001 adaptation of “Around the World in 80 Days,” Jules Verne’s 1872 adventure novel. Five actors will portray 39 roles “and an elephant,” says CRT director and co-founder John Sbordone.

• “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the Christmas holiday classic reconfigured as a radio play.

• “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” Lanie Robertson’s 1986 semi-fictional play with music that imagines one of the last performances of jazz singer Billie Holiday.

• “Art,” the 1994 comedy by French playwright Yasmina Reza, in which three friends debate the merits of a pricey, all-white painting. The City Rep production will feature an all-female cast.

• An evening of one-act plays featuring Israel Horowitz’s “Line” and selections from David Ives’s “All in the Timing.”

The lone play making its CRT debut will be “The Colored Museum,” that 1986 work by George C. Wolfe that features 11 “exhibits” (vignettes) which use satire, drama and pathos to explore aspects of African-American identity and culture.

Asked to confirm that “Avenue Q” will go full throttle on the puppet sex, Sbordone replies “Of course,” sounding as nonchalant as Aunt Mabel reciting her recipe for buttermilk biscuits.

“This thing started back in the early 2000s, was on Broadway and won Tony Awartds,” he says. “This is old hat. What are you talking about?”

And yet there’s a mischievous edge in Sbordone’s tone, because he knows that most community theaters that dared to step onto “Avenue Q” would likely be more demure in portraying erotic puppet shenanigans – if they staged the play at all.

Featuring music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx and a book by Jeff Whitty, “Avenue Q” is a ribald, free-wheeling, adult-themed parody of “Sesame Street” in which human characters interact with puppet characters. The puppeteers appear on stage and make no attempt to conceal themselves, while the puppet and human characters ignore the puppeteers.

The musical’s ensemble cast includes such puppet characters as Princeton, a recent college grad (played by Xavier Torres), Princeton’s on-again-off-again romantic partner Kate Monster (Ella Hanks), Lucy the Slut (Terri Williams), porn-addicted Trekkie Monster (played by Ben Beck, a keyboardist who also will be performing the show’s music), the Bad Idea Bears (Khloe Perez and Amanda Lopez), Mrs. Lavinia Thistletwat (Terri Williams), Rod the Wall Street investment banker (Beau Wade), and Nicky (Trey Pate).

Human characters include Brian (Chris Nelson), Christmas Eve (Anne Demeglio) and Gary Coleman – yes, that Gary Coleman, at least in the “Avenue Q” universe (played by Phillipa Rose).

Such songs as “It Sucks to Be Me,” “If You Were Gay,” “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” and “The Internet Is for Porn” are blatant indicators that the musical’s satire is mature stuff that tackles depression, sexual identity, racism and other adult issues. The play won Best Musical, Book and Score at the 2004 Tony Awards.

The puppets are being supplied by Penguin Point Costume Shop, which is owned and operated by James Brendlinger, who taught theater at Matanzas High School before taking a similar post at Oviedo High School in June. The shop’s warehouse remains in Bunnell, Brendlinger said in an Instagram post.

“Puppetry is a particular skill,” Sbordone says. “We bought the actors sponge balls to get their hands in shape, and have asked them to start lifting two- and five-pound weights with their puppet arm to get ready. These are fairly large puppets and it’s a two-hour show, so in addition to all the stamina and resilience you need as an actor, there’s the – I don’t want to say burden, but there is the task of being able to keep that puppet energetic and alive for that long.”

Along with navigating the sheer physicality of puppetry, the puppeteers are charged with imbuing their alter egos with human emotions and traits.

“We try to explain to the actors that their arm becomes the soul of the puppet,” Sbordone says. “It’s fascinating to watch the actor and the puppet working side by side, and then interacting with other puppets and actors. It’s quite an amazing thing, quite unique. You don’t see it much (in theater).

“And of course the play is just fun.”

Although the bulk of CRT’s 2025-2026 season is reboots, the lineup does not represent, Sbordone insists, any sort of “greatest hits” from the theater’s 14-year history.

“We’ve had so many really terrific shows,” he says. “We have lots to remember. ‘Avenue Q’ represents part of the ‘no fear’ philosophy we’ve tried to have. I consider ‘Line’ by Israel Horowitz to be one of the finest one-acts ever written. With an all-female cast for Yasmina Reza’s ‘Art,’ we’ll be celebrating Women’s History Month. ‘The Colored Museum’ celebrates Black History Month. But certainly there are scores of other shows that we consider among our finest work.

“The more important thing is that we hope every production is brand new. It may be the same material, but it’s approached with new casts and new ways of expressing the fundamentals of the play or musical.”

Here’s a more detailed look at City Repertory Theatre’s 2025-2026 season. Performances will be in CRT’s black box theater at City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B207, Palm Coast. Shows are at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 3 p.m. Sundays.

Season tickets are $165. Individual show ticket prices are cited below. Individual tickets and season subscriptions are available online at crtpalmcoast.com or by calling 386-585-9415. Tickets also will be available at the venue just before curtain time.

Dates in the list below are the opening and final performance of each production.

• “Avenue Q” – Sept. 19-Oct. 5. Individual tickets are $30 adults and $15 students.

• “Around the World in 80 Days” – Nov. 14-23. $25 adults, $15 students. Mark Brown’s comedic 2001 adaptation of Jules Verne’s 1872 novel finds adventurer Phileas Fogg and his faithful manservant Passepartout attempting to circle the globe in 80 days – even as they are pursued by a detective who believes Fogg is a thief on the run. Five actors will portray all 39 characters.

• “It’s a Wonderful Life” – Dec. 5-14. $25 adults, $15 students. Frank Capra’s beloved 1946 film was adapted in 1996 by Joe Landry in the style of a live 1940s radio play. This holiday classic tells the story of George Bailey, whose misfortunes lead him to Christmas Eve depression – and earn him a visit from Clarence, an affable guardian angel.

As the performers read their lines into microphones at a radio studio, they will be aided by a foley artist – that’s theater/film jargon for a sound effects specialist.

• “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” – Jan. 9-18, 2026. $30 adults, $15 students. Lanie Robertson’s 1986 semi-fictionalized work imagines one of the last performances of legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday. Set in 1959 a few months before Holiday’s death, the play portrays Lady Day (that’s one of her nicknames) in a seedy South Philadelphia bar as she’s accompanied by a pianist. It’s a two-person play with music rather than a musical, given that the Holiday character delivers lengthy, revelatory monologues between performing such songs as “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” “Gimme a Pigfoot (And a Bottle of Beer),” “T’ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” and the classics “God Bless the Child” and the chilling “Strange Fruit,” about the lynching of Black people in the American South.

Singer Laniece Fagundes and pianist Ben Beck, both City Rep veterans, will be reprising their roles from CRT’s 2021 production.

• “The Colored Museum” – Feb. 20-March 1. $30 adults, $15 students. George C. Wolfe’s 1986 work blends satire, humor, drama and pathos across 11 “exhibits” (vignettes) that address aspects of African-American identity and culture. Among the “exhibits” are “Soldier with a Secret,” “The Gospel According to Miss Roj” (about a transgender woman), “The Hairpiece” and “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play.”

• “Art” – March 20-29. $25 adults, $15 students. This 1994 Tony-winning comedy by French playwright Yasmina Reza portrays the debates and banter among three friends when one of them buys a pricey painting that happens to be entirely white. This production will feature an all-female cast.

• An evening of one-act plays featuring Israel Horowitz’s “Line” and selections from David Ives’s “All in the Timing” – April 24-May 3. $25 adults, $15 students. Absurdist comedy will take center stage in these one-act works.

“Line” is Horovitz’s 1967 play about five people waiting in line for an event whose exact nature is never disclosed, although several of the characters’ statements about the event contradict each other. Regardless, each of the characters maneuvers to be first in line.

The bizarro scenarios of Ives’s 1994 “All in the Timing” include three chimpanzees contemplating high literature, the erotic aspects of miniature golf, and multiple replays of murder in “Variations on the Death of Trotsky.”

– Rick de Yampert for FlaglerLive