I knew Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown was my friend. And you are no Charlie Brown. I felt saying something like that to the glossy, Broadway-styled new version of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” which has just opened at the Ambassador Theater. Let me admit – for nostalgia can be a sour taskmaster – that I loved the 1967 off-Broadway original.
Indeed, I loved it so much that I still have on my study wall a framed Charles Schulz cartoon – used to advertise that show – of Charlie Brown saying to Lucy: “Just think, Lucy … It’s the Happiest Show in Town,” while a think-bubble emerging from Snoopy reads, “Clive Barnes says so!” Well, Clive Barnes says so no more.
Not that the new musical version of Schulz’s historically immortal comic strip, “Peanuts,” doesn’t have quite a lot going for it. It does – almost everything except the score (which it never did have) and the basic premise, which has somehow, somewhere been lost in the whirlwind of gussying up the old property.
The book by Clark Gesner, essentially based on panels from the original strip, has been updated to include new material from the past three decades, and a couple of new, substituted songs by Andrew Lippa. All the best-known numbers are retained, the whole thing remaining affectionately tumpty-tum, with the lyrics far more interesting than the stream-of-unconsciousness music.
The performances – apart from Anthony Rapp’s bland and improperly bewildered Charlie (Charlie should seem bewildered by life, not the dramatic material) – are positively brilliant, with Ilana Levine as a sandpaper-voiced Lucy; Kristin Chenoweth, frizzle-haired and astonished as Charlie’s little sister Sally (a role new to the revision); and Roger Bart as a bewitchingly anthropomorphic, showbiz Snoopy.
There is also nothing wrong with Michael Mayer’s staging that reconsideration could not correct. Kenneth Posner’s boldly cartoon-patterned lighting and, best of all, David Gallo’s surrealistically nutty scenery – in the manner of his earlier show “Jackie” – have the vivid visual interest that’s relevant to entertainment based on a comic strip.
But the praise stops right there, because the overall treatment and concept are absurdly inflated and, to my mind, out of character and miss the entire point, not to mention the entire charm, of the original show. So what goes disastrous?
Schulz’s booby-trapped world suggests a time capsule of arrested sophistication, where high school behavior patterns are grafted onto nursery school children, producing an ambiguity with which almost all age groups can identify. In the original production, the suggestion was of adult actors, playing charades amid simple schoolroom boxes.
That ambiguity and vital distancing is now quite lost. Here, you have grown-ups grotesquely pretending to be children in a production so keen to leave nothing to chance that little is left to imagination. It is a perfect example of the Zen adage that less is more. I’m sorry, I feel like Snoopy’s Red Baron – but that’s life. *
Caryl Churchill, like other late 20th-century playwrights fearful of the cinema’s appropriation of their dramatic territory, is obsessed with revealing her plays’ stageworthy differences from movie scripts.
Her adventurousness, her pushing of envelopes – most of them stamped with originality and postmarked with success – has given Churchill an unassailable position among her contemporaries. She is a fascinating original, and in England her only real peers are Pinter and Stoppard. But lately it seems to me that she has led herself into experimentation for its own sake – a dangerously primrosed path for any artist.
I was first aware of this with her phantasmagoric, sub-Joycean, sub-fairytale mystery play, “The Shriker,” presented a couple of years back at the Public Theater. Now, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Majestic Theater is Churchill’s latest, a double-bill called “Blue Heart,” directed by Max Stafford-Clark. While I am not as nonplussed by it as I was by “The Shriker,” I am definitely unplussed to the point of disappointment.
She calls these two one-acters “anti-plays,” suggesting that each contains the seeds of destruction within it. Say you so. Both are basically interesting. But neither is as interesting as it pretends to be. Both are partly exercises in acting and direction – and the actors, notably Mary Macleod, June Watson, Bernard Gallagher and Pearce Quigley, are first-rate, while Stafford-Clark’s staging is seamless with the text.
The first play, “Heart’s Desire,” is an essay in construction and a philosophical musing on chance. It has a stop-return-start mechanism (think of the Bill Murray movie “Groundhog Day”), suggesting the endlessly fraught possibilities of a suburban family awaiting the return of a daughter from Australia.
The writing, not unexpectedly, is superb within the formalistic gimmick, but this formalistic parallel-world gimmick is really all there is to the play, and the fortune-cookie message that with life you never can tell.
Unlike “Heart’s Desire,” the story of “Blue Kettle” – a complex consideration of a young man who cons old ladies into believing that he is the long-lost son they had put up for adoption – is fascinating.
But unfortunately, here the story loiters unexploited, as Churchill explores the obvious, if daring, linguistic trick that if you substitute the word “kettle” for any two-syllable word or the word “blue” for any one-syllable – audiences will still pick up the meaning from the context and intonation. So what that we could have guessed for ourselves – half of the actors mumble anyway. And amid all this empty and shallow cleverness, we are never led into the resonances of the story’s possible depths.
