You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown is a great show for children. Well, maybe for older children. Much older children. Because while I was all awash in nostalgia (and wondering why, if they had gone to the trouble to write Sally in, she doesn't get to call Linus her Sweet Babboo?) at least one child at Saturday night's performance wasn't quite as familiar with the Peanuts gang as the rest of us.
"I don't get it!" he complained fairly early on. Like about 8:05 or so. Later on, around 8:10, he did. "Oh, I get it!" All of his color commentary was loud enough for the entire room to hear, much to his mother's dismay. (That whole outside voices, inside voices, during-the-performance voices just hasn't sunk in for him yet, you know?)
But the best was probably during one of Chuck's bits. Chuck, as Linus (and Linus ain't just Sally's Sweet Babboo, let me tell you), was sucking his thumb. He removed the thumb from his mouth, considered it, and said "I think I'm losing my flavor!" Most of the audience chuckled, but our own John Madden, Jr. really loved it. He guffawed and repeated "I think I'm losing my flavor!!" If he'd had a Telestrator handy, he could have light-penned the thumb-from-mouth maneuver for us.
Sometimes one's $11 merely gets an evening of light entertainment, but when we're really lucky some one in the audience is discovering why theater - and good ol' Charlie Brown - is so great after all.
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"So, Leta, is it difficult to live your life so that whenever you need to illustrate a point, you have an anecdote from your personal experience?" No, not really.
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"On a break" is community theater for "spend more time with my family" which is politics for "unemployed." (Leta)
"If you want to help the American theater, don't be a performer -- be an audience." (Tallulah Bankhead)
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
2 comments:
Part of the difficulty with You're a Good Man Charlie Brown for kids is that it references running gags from the strip that haven't been seen in 40 years. For example Lucy telling Linus rafts of misinformation. In later years, Linus was no longer a todler, but rather a contemporary of Charlie Brown, largely replacing Sherman as CBs straight man. --Simon
I had the chance to visit the Charles Schultz Museum in Santa Rosa, CA, not too long ago. It's well worth the visit, especially if you're with friends who are also Peanuts fans. --Rosellen
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