Avenue Q/Tear Jerker

Avenue Q is mostly comedic, but it could wrench your heart.

• Surprisingly, the end of the first act of Avenue Q can do this. With "Fantasies Come True", the Distant Duet based around Rod hearing his crush Nicky's affections for him ends with him realising it was All Just a Dream. The few seconds before Rod's heartbroken line "Good night, Nicky" is one of the only parts of the musical where the audience will be totally silent. The sadness lifts for Rod's Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today? song, then dives straight back in for the last song of the act, "There's a Fine Fine Line", a ballad to Kate's realisation that she'd be better off if she broke up with Princeton.
• There's A Fine, Fine Line. Yes, right in the middle of a hilarious comedy is one of the saddest songs ever.
• "For Now", the finale of the show, heart-wrenching, despite a couple hilarious lines interspersed.

Each time you smile
it'll only last a while

• And then it ends with a sad, slow, lyrical reprise of the opening Avenue Q Theme, as if to say that, for everything that you'll try to do, in the end we all must resign to our ultimate fate and break our own spirits. * sob*
  • It's bittersweet but... it's not meant to be doom and gloom. "Everything in life... is only for now." It means the good AND the bad are brief and it doesn't matter if you have a purpose or lived a good life: All that matters is that you LIVED. Even if the good moments are short, it means that the bad moments will pass too.
• I Wish I Could Go Back To College, in which about half the cast sings about how the time they'd spent at college was the best time of their lives...until real life hit them in the face and killed off their hopes and dreams. Doubly painful in that the idea of going back to the life they miss is rather brutally rejected by Nicky.

Nicky: But, if
I were to go back to college
Think what a loser I'd be
I'd walk through the quad, and think, oh my god,
These kids are so much younger than me...

• The scene where Rod comes out to Christmas Eve. It's one of the few scenes played completely serious as the puppet quietly breaks down into tears.