YOU’RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE BROWN
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Michael Rassel’s staging offers nothing so bizarre. But this raffish, energetic, very funny production does break from tradition–by avoiding the let’s-pretend-we’re-comic-strip-characters approach this show often falls prey to. Even better, it’s free of the schlock sentimentality that has plagued Peanuts since the mid-1960s, when the strip stopped being a witty entertainment and turned into the bottom-line mass-merchandising phenomenon that has made Charles Schulz (according to Forbes magazine’s estimate) one of the ten richest men in the U.S. entertainment business.
In fact, I haven’t laughed so much at a Peanuts strip in years as I laughed at this production, which is Theatre of the Reconstruction’s first attempt at a weekend-matinee kids’ show. (It certainly won’t be the last, judging from the nearly full house at last Sunday’s opening–nearly all neighborhood families, according to the mailing list people were signing in the lobby.) Rassel’s Charlie Brown has all the wry, edgy, anxious humor that made Schulz’s early strips so lastingly funny. Born in 1950, Peanuts in its early stages was a close cousin to the sociopsychoanalytic cartoons of Jules Feiffer and the stage shows of Mike Nichols and Elaine May; using children rather than adults as his characters allowed Schulz not only to reach a broader family market but to use children’s problems as a metaphor for adults’.
Oh, yes. The kids in the audience liked it too.
