Book, Music and Lyrics: Clark Gesner
Additional Music and Lyrics: Andrew Lippa
Additional Dialogue: Michael Mayer
Director: Amanda Noar
Charles M Schulz’s Peanuts newspaper strip started in 1950 and ran until 2000, making cultural icons of its characters, especially Charlie Brown and his independently-minded beagle, Snoopy.
Clark Gesner’s 1967 musical You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown launched at the height of interest in Schultz’s array of world-weary five-year-olds, although the production at Upstairs at the Gatehouse is of the 1999 revival with additional music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa, which secured Tony Awards for Broadways legends Roger Bart and Kristen Chenoweth.
The musical centres around Charlie Brown (a goofily lanky Jordan Broatch) and a small subset of his friends from the strip. Beside them, Snoopy – Oliver Sidney, decked out in a white tail suit and dogbone bow tie – lives in his own world.
Gesner and Lippa’s songs stick predominantly to the Broadway musical style, largely devoid of the jazzy pep of Vince Guaraldi’s soundtracks for the TV animated specials that first appeared in the 1960s. The book does not have much of a common story, instead using the short nature of the comic strip’s sequences to form a series of humorous scenes, some of which prompt songs. Thus, the musical becomes more of a revue-style show, with adult actors playing children.
While that is fine as far as it goes, such a structure really relies on the humour being pin-sharp. But Schultz’s approach to humour – more prone to philosophical whimsy than belly laughs – is reflected so faithfully by director Amanda Noar that it often feels like the scenes fizzle out. That is not to deny that the scenes themselves carry any weight, as the cast’s embodiment of the strip’s key characters is highly endearing.
In particular, Jacob Cornish takes great fun in portraying the intellectual Linus, whose passion for cerebral sentences is matched only by his affection for his comfort blanket. As his older sister Lucy, Eleanor Fransch manifests the character’s anger issues and need to dominate everyone else, while Millie Robins’s Sally smartly articulates the character’s unique take on logic.
With such a great cast, it is a shame that neither book nor song ever lives up to the calibre of the performances. Some exceptions come with Troy Yip’s Schroeder. On the page, the character is a serious musical obsessive, glued to his toy piano; on stage, Yip combines this with a puppyish glee that infects the whole production whenever he is afforded the chance to take centre stage.
The real puppy of the production is of course Snoopy, and Sidney’s tap-dancing, Red Baron-fighting anthropomorphisation is delightful. Amongst this crowd, Charlie Brown himself often gets lost. That is a shame because Broatch’s characterisation shows that one doesn’t need physical similarity to embody a beloved role. But like so many Peanuts strips and TV specials, the central character is frequently eclipsed by personalities brash, bolder and less likeable than their own.
Musical director Harry Style and his band perform Gesner and Lippa’s songs well, but there is little in the way of memorable or distinctive character to them. It all adds to the disjointedness of the evening. When the cast gathers round at the end to reaffirm to Charlie Brown that, yes, he is a good man, it feels more like an acknowledgement that the scenes have come to an end than a realisation garnered from the preceding couple of hours.
Devotees of the comic strip will be cheered by Roy Boswell-Green’s set design and Holly Louise Chapman’s costumes, which poke playful nods to the bold, hand-drawn lines of Schultz’s strips. But despite the whole team’s sterling efforts, it feels like You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown is a musical that could only be fully enjoyed by Peanuts completists.
Continues until 14 January 2024
