THEATER REVIEW
'You're
a Good Man, Charlie Brown':
A Nice
Loser and His Gutsy Sister
By BEN BRANTLEY
NEW YORK -- Sally Brown is mad at the world, and if the world has any sense
at all, it will
stay out of her way. Though still on the fair side of 5, Sally has a highly
developed sense of the
injustice and
futility of life. Her indignation quotient is off the charts, and her mighty
bleat of a voice
could bring
down the walls of Jericho. She is not, perhaps, a child you would want
to shepherd
through an afternoon
at the mall, but on a Broadway stage, she is invaluable company.
Sally Brown is
portrayed by a small but definitely adult actress named
Kristin Chenoweth,
who is giving one of those break-out performances
that send careers
skyward in the revival of "You're a Good Man,
Charlie Brown,"
which opened Thursday night at the Ambassador
Theater. She
is also the only significant reason for adults
unaccompanied
by children to sit through this mild-mannered, sticky
evening of skits
and songs inspired by Charles M. Schulz's long-running
"Peanuts" comic
strip.
You see, Ms.
Chenoweth, playing someone who wasn't even a
character in
the original Off-Broadway hit of the late 1960s, is
terrifically
appealing, but her Sally is simply too strident, too angry, too
agitated to
ever be considered merely cute. (Considering she wears a
mop of Shirley
Temple curls, this is an accomplishment.)
A lack of conventional
cuteness was what allowed Schulz's dot-eyed, round-headed creatures to
conquer America
in the 1950s. Admittedly, a comic strip that features a dog who fantasizes
about
being a World
War I flying ace can be long on whimsy. But Schulz also cannily created
a world of
children shaped
by an age of anxiety. The atomic bomb, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein
were
not usual topics
of conversation in "Peanuts," but depression, rejection, sour stomachs
and the
meaninglessness
of existence were.
Charlie Brown,
the ultimate loser, the boy who never received a Valentine or won a Little
League
baseball game,
spoke directly to the nagging fears and self-doubts that many adults were
beginning
to realize they
would never outgrow. Yet he and his friends never seemed just like grown-ups
in
kids' clothing.
They were deliciously sui generis figures in a self-contained universe.
Translating them
from pen and
ink drawings into flesh and blood performances would seem to be impossible.
Nonetheless,
according to most reviews, this metamorphosis was achieved winningly when
"You're a
Good Man, Charlie
Brown," with songs by Clark Gesner and with Gary Burghoff (who went on
to
play Radar in
the film and television versions of "MASH") in the title role, opened Off
Broadway at
the tiny Theater
80 St. Marks in 1967. A "small miracle" was how Walter Kerr, writing in
The New
York Times,
described the show. "Almost everything works," Kerr went on to say, "because
almost
everything is
effortless."
Effortless, unfortunately,
is exactly what this new incarnation, staged by Michael Mayer, is not.
The
production has
been revised to incorporate new material from Schulz's strips, and, while
most of
Gesner's original
score remains, it has been extensively rearranged by Andrew Lippa, who
also has
written several
new songs. The problem isn't that the new material fails to mesh with the
old, or even
that the original
material feels particularly dated, though it does bring to mind the zippy,
quick-take
revue format
made popular by the old "Laugh-In" television series.
The real problem
is a matter of scale. "Charlie Brown" was created for an intimate space,
and it is
telling that
when it reopened on Broadway in 1971, many critics felt that much of its
original charm
had evaporated.
For this version, the ever-inventive designer David Gallo has filled the
Ambassador
stage with neon-crayon-color
sets (matched by Michael Krass' costumes) that give an electric jolt to
the lines of
Schulz's fabled draughtsmanship. But there's an uncomfortable feeling of
dead air that the
cast, led by
Anthony Rapp (of the original "Rent") as Charlie, must work much too hard
to fill.
Songs that were
created as droll, low-key character portraits have been reconceived as
showstoppers,
and the frail, winsome little bodies of these numbers just aren't up to
the job. When
Linus (B.D.
Wong) sings a duet with his famous security blanket, which has been wired
to dance on
its own, the
sequence has a flailing, improvised quality that is the stuff of actor's
nightmares.
So does the song
in which Charlie Brown wrestles with a recalcitrant kite. What we should
be
focusing on
is the poor fellow's exasperation, his sense of being eternally at odds
with his
environment.
Yet somehow, all I could see was the bobbing kite string that stretched
across the
stage. Charlie
Brown himself might as well have been invisible.
This has something
to do with Rapp's very strange conception of his part. The actor, who was
a
dynamo in "Rent,"
plays Charlie Brown not as an aggrieved, complaining target of the slings
and
arrows of daily
life, but as a passive, saintly innocent.
With his fixed
beatific smile, his hair flattened against his head and his eyes as sweetly
glazed as a
Krispy Kreme
doughnut, he suggests those clean-cut young people who approach you in
airports
with religious
pamphlets. This is not a Charlie Brown that anyone, except possibly some
New Age
cultist could
identify with, and there is a hole where the show's empathic center should
be.
As Schroeder,
the Beethoven-loving pianist, Stanley Wayne Mathis seems comparably
hard-pressed
to find any real character to play. As the titanically crabby Lucy Van
Pelt, Ilana Levine
gives a shtick-driven
performance, hitting each word and each note as though with a mallet.
Wong, as a lisping
Linus, fares better, though he occasionally slides into preciousness. Roger
Bart, in
the plum role
of Snoopy, the charismatic beagle, incorporates some delightful doglike
mannerisms.
He does a nice
job with the "Red Baron" number, which also offers the evening's most ingenious
visual effects.
But his hymn to the joys of eating, "Suppertime," which should bring down
the house,
is deflatingly
oversold in both the staging and the orchestration.
Mayer has proven
himself a solid and resourceful director of dramas with the recent Broadway
productions
of "A View From the Bridge" and "Side Man." But as he demonstrated in his
staging of
"Triumph of
Love," he is clearly less comfortable with musicals.
Schulz's characters,
though cartoons, are a sly and subtle lot, and they don't benefit from
hard-sell
performances.
Their sweetly neurotic souls get lost when their interpreters are beaming
away like an
Up With People
chorus. (The show's signature song, "Happiness," is, and always was, pure
syrup.)
On the other
hand, it was Mayer who was largely responsible for shaping the interpolated
role of
Sally and for
casting Ms. Chenoweth in the part, and for that he deserves much credit.
Debating
relentlessly
with an unseen school teacher about receiving the grade of a C on her wire-hanger
sculpture, scowling
at a hopelessly tangled jump rope or vengefully explaining to Snoopy that
he is at
the bottom of
the family's chain of command, Ms. Chenoweth's Sally finds a mega-volt
show-business
energy in life's unresting siege of frustrations.
This is all conveyed
through postures that amazingly replicate the stances of Schulz's drawn
characters without
seeming stiff (her accusatory extended arm is divine), and her shiny, perfectly
pitched voice
seems a natural extension of her physical presence.
Watching her
here is what it must have been like to catch a novice named Bernadette
Peters lighting
up a musical
spoof called "Dames at Sea" 30 years ago. Ms. Chenoweth has appeared in
New
York before,
most notably in "Steel Pier" and Encores' concert version of "Strike Up
the Band," but
this is the
part that should seal her reputation. This glow cast by a star-in-the-making
gives a real
Broadway magic
to a show that otherwise feels sadly shrunken in a Times Square theater.