✭✭✭✩✩

music, lyrics and book by Clark Gesner,

directed by Allen MacInnis

Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People, Toronto

November 13-December 30, 2008

The current LKTYP production of Clark Gesner’s 1967 hit musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown is a curiously abstract affair.  While the parents and grandparents who take their children to see the show may fondly remember reading Charles Schulz’s daily Peanuts comic strips, the children aged six and up at whom the show is aimed will likely know more about Thomas the Tank Engine or Dora the Explorer than Charlie Brown even if the comic strip ran for fifty years (1950-2000).

Rather than introduce children to the iconic images Schulz created, Robin Fisher’s set consists of staggered rows of colour-changing light-boxes looking like the empty frames of a comic strip.  If Snoopy is lying on a red box, we have to guess that it is his dog house.  Meanwhile, Judith Bowden’s costumes are not the simple threads the Peanuts gang wears but elaborately tiered patchwork creations--Charlie Brown’s appliquéd with socks and Linus’s with mittens (but why?)--that make the cast look like a set of rag dolls rather than Schulz’s simple drawings.  The show itself is not a continuous story but a series of vignettes about the obsessions of the various characters.  Unquestionably, Cyrus Lane’s Charlie Brown and Jay Turvey’s Snoopy make the greatest impression, with Turvey’s rendition of “Snoopy” the single best sung song in the show.  Jessica Greenberg’s unflappable Sally Brown is consistently funny.  The humour of Andrew Kushnir’s Linus and Karim Morgan’s Schroeder, the two most given to intellectual speculation, is clearly funnier to adults than to children.  Jane Miller captures Lucy egotism and bossiness but is grating, not endearing.       

     

Though LKTYP is presenting the 1999 revision of Gesner’s musical by Andrew Lippa and Michael Mayer, Peanuts fans will be surprised that even the revision does not include either Lucy’s pulling the football away from Charlie Brown at the last minute or the Great Pumpkin.  Since Gesner’s score is largely forgettable, in the end it is Charlie Brown’s expressions of inferiority and Snoopy’s active fantasy life, though too little of it is shown, that still seem to resonate with children and show them that their own inner feelings are not anomalous.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-11-14.

Photo: Jane Miller as Lucy. ©Andrew Wallace.