What
if the 'Peanuts' Gang Graduated to Cheeversville?
By VINCENT CANBY
N EW YORK -- That Charles Schulz doesn't rate an entry in the Oxford Companion
to
American Literature can only be explained as some ghastly oversight on
the part of the
editors. It
is true that Schulz is known primarily as a cartoonist. Yet he not only
writes his own
scripts for
"Peanuts," which first appeared in 1950; he also letters his own dialogue
in the balloons
that float over
his characters' heads. Not even John Cheever, John Updike or any of the
other
esteemed chroniclers
of life in the American suburbs and exurbs after World War II could make
such a claim.
What, after all, do we mean when we speak of "a man of letters?"
Ponder that.
In the meantime,
if you're looking for a gentle, wise, very
cheering entertainment,
you couldn't do better than to
visit the Ambassador
Theater to see the almost-new,
pocket-size
musical "You're a Good Man, Charlie
Brown." This
is Michael Mayer's revival of the 1967 Off
Broadway hit,
based on the "Peanuts" comic strip, for
which Clark
Gesner wrote the music, book and lyrics.
Among other things,
you will discover a blissfully sunny
alternate universe
to the one of broken marriages, career
compromises,
alcoholism, mental breakdowns (plus the
occasional redemption)
that became so familiar in
American literature
of the postwar years.
This isn't to
suggest for a minute that Schulz had any such ideas in mind when he created
the
born-to-lose
Charlie Brown and the other members of the "Peanuts" gang. They remain
forever
young in Schulz's
static universe, where no one seems to be older than 10 and where the most
poetic
mind among them
is possessed by a beagle named Snoopy.
The landscape
around them is generic and two-dimensional: a tree is a tree, a cloud a
cloud, a
doghouse a doghouse.
Yet Schulz's characters are so accurately and eccentrically realized, you
suspect that
if they ever grew up, they would be much like Cheever's, getting into boozy
Saturday
night scrapes
in a town with a name like Shady Hill. Charlie Brown and his friends may
be children,
but they wear
their neuroses with pride.
Think of Lucy,
a crabby child only too happy to tell someone the blunt, embarrassing truth,
who is
madly in love
with the piano-playing Schroeder and serenely unaware that, for him, she
doesn't exist.
The adult Lucy
will be the last to know her husband is sleeping with every woman in the
neighborhood
except her. Schroeder will leave home hoping for a career as a concert
artist, but he
will wind up
playing the organ in any church that will have him. Then there is Linus,
who walks
around clutching
his beloved blanket, an embryonic fetishist's festishist if there ever
was one.
Charlie Brown's
little sister, Sally (who replaces the character of Patty in Mayer's revival
of the
show), is all
Shirley Temple corkscrew curls and simpering grins. But as played by the
spectacularly
funny Kristin
Chenoweth, she has a voice that is sharp enough to etch monograms into
Baccarat
crystal. She
will be Shady Hill's most successful fundraiser, at least in part because
people will pay
her to stay
away.
Dear sweet clumsy
Charlie Brown? He will drop out of college, run a hardware store, coach
a
second-rate
Little League team and, in his middle years, start to (lower your voice
so the children
can't hear)
d-r-i-n-k. The most humane, least neurotic of the gang is Snoopy, and he
will be long
gone by the
time his old pals fall apart.
These fantasies
are not meant to belittle Schulz's classic strip, but to explain its long-term
appeal. His
accomplishment
has been to create children who are recognizable both as children and as
the adults
they will become.
They are not exactly the kids next door. They live in a reality that is
singular to the
Schulz strip.
It is this quality
that makes Mayer's "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" such an endearing
endeavor, a
series of sketches intended to represent an average day in the life of
Charlie Brown. In
most cases the
members of the cast, never attempt to deny the evidence of their actual
ages. Instead,
they play their
roles straight, that is, from the inside out, without resorting to all-purpose
kiddie
mannerisms.
The results are
astonishing in several cases. Ms. Chenoweth's Sally is both a kid you might
want to
swat if you
had to live with her, and a personality who tomorrow could play Miss Adelaide
in "Guys
and Dolls."
She is magical on stage. So, too, is B.D. Wong, who made his Broadway debut
in "M.
Butterfly" in
1988. Now in his later 30s, he appears to be having the time of his life
giving a priceless
performance
as the thumb-sucking, blanket-clutching, singing and dancing Linus. Not
for a minute
does he disguise
the man he is but, in him, Linus lives. How does he do it? I haven't a
clue. That's
theater.
Ilana Levine,
whose grating voice is also a superb musical comedy weapon, is enchanting
as the
furrow-browed
Lucy, as when she instructs Linus to study Charlie Brown's "Failure Face."
"Notice
the deep lines,"
she says with nasty pleasure, "the dull, vacant look in the eyes."
Playing the show's
star beagle is Roger Bart, a marvelous clown whose manic energy and facial
expressions
are reminiscent of Ronnie Graham's. He is an explosively comic joy as Snoopy,
whether
doing imaginary
battle with the Red Baron in the skies over France, lolling in the sun
atop his
doghouse or
anticipating the delights of his evening meal.
Stanley Wayne
Mathis is as lively as his meager material allows in the role of Schroeder,
while
Anthony Rapp,
a good actor you may remember as the camcorder operator in "Rent," appears
to be
bewildered as
Charlie Brown. The role is not especially rewarding, I suspect.
Charlie Brown
is a passive figure. He is diffident, lonely, apologetic, not easily brought
to active life
by someone who
does not yet have his own idiosyncratic stage presence, such as a young
Robert
Morse. Rapp's
way is sometimes to play down to Charlie Brown, as in his taking small,
childlike
steps, and at
other times to play him as a more or less conventional musical comedy juvenile
in the
middle of what
is otherwise a cartoon.
Andrew Lippa,
the show's musical supervisor and arranger, has written new material for
some of the
Gesner songs
and two new numbers of his own. The one you will remember: "My New Philosophy,"
in which Sally
realizes that she can respond to almost any statement by saying "That's
what you
think," and
Schroeder decides that his comeback will be, "Why are you telling me?"
"You're a Good
Man, Charlie Brown" is small in scale, simply but effectively set in a
cartoon world,
and demands
a certain knowledge of and affection for Schulz's work. Mayer, whose last
major
Broadway hit
was the powerhouse revival of Arthur Miller's "View From the Bridge," is
clearly a
man who likes
to test his range.