Happiness is...

When I was 10, I was a theater geek—in addition to acting in children's theater, I was reading Shakespeare and Edward Albee (didn’t quite "get" what was going on in Taming of the Shrew or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf), collecting the annual Best Plays book series, and listening to original cast albums of hit musicals. My other big passion was comics, and these two interests came crashing together in 1967 when I got the cast album of the off-Broadway hit You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, based on Charles Schulz's comic strip Peanuts. It went into high rotation on my record player, along with albums of The Music Man, Oliver, and Man of La Mancha (with the Beatles in there occasionally as well). The songs were as funny and inspired as the strip, the adult actors did a good job of sounding like kids, and the music was catchy, being both simple (the primary musical instrument in evidence was piano) and complex (the way multiple voices and melodies wind together in "Book Report"). It caught the tone of the strip as well, pitched between youthful happiness and adult melancholy: though the characters are children, they dealt with grown-up anxieties like loneliness, peer pressure, and love.

In 1985, the musical was adapted for television as an animated hour-long special on CBS. For the network, this certainly made sense since the first Peanuts TV show, A Charlie Brown Christmas, had became an instant classic, and several more shows followed. However, the TV shows were fully-developed half-hour narratives, whereas the musical really had no plot; it was a series of songs and sketches that followed Charlie, Linus, Lucy, Schroeder, and Snoopy through an average day. I saw the show on its initial airing and remember being disappointed. I suspect it was not a big hit because it hasn’t become a standard network rerun. Now it’s out on DVD from Warner Home Video for re-inspection.

I enjoyed it more than I expected to, but I can see why it hasn’t become a classic. First on the minus side is the aforementioned lack of narrative drive. In fact, the one segment that does build up some plot momentum, the baseball game, in which Charlie Brown writes a letter to a pen pal about participating in a championship game, is the weakest part of the show. Though the cartoon could show action that couldn’t be presented on stage, it doesn’t, so the game is “told” through Charlie's letters rather than shown. This refusal to use the full breadth of animation possibilities is a problem throughout. The couple times they do go fanciful, as in Lucy and Schroeder’s "Moonlight Sonata" number, work well.

The other big stumbling block is the use of children to voice the characters. I understand why they did this: kids were used in the other Peanuts cartoons, and certainly A Charlie Brown Christmas would not have been half as charming as it was if adults had done the voices. But here, having children sing a score intended for adult voices is a weakness. Jessie Lee Smith, as Lucy, does fine, but everyone else is just passable, and Kevin Brando as Charlie Brown can't hit the high notes at all, which caused me much cringing.

On the plus side, though the 48 minute show is forced to cut some of the stage material, the best songs remain, and they still work well. "Book Report," in which we see the kids each dealing in their own ways with having to write a book report on Peter Rabbit, is an absolutely charming number, and it's well-animated—I especially like the touch, fairly early in the digital era, of having Schroeder composing his report, in which he tries desperately to compare the boring Peter Rabbit story to the exciting exploits of Robin Hood, at a computer screen. We see him start sentences, then change his mind and delete them from the screen (indicated in the original score by a slashing sound, like a pencil against paper); then, we see the Robin Hood adventures animated in the style of a primitive video game. Snoopy doesn't speak out loud but he does have an interior speaking and singing voice, and his mellow song "Not Bad At All" is a highlight.

Other particularly enjoyable songs include Snoopy’s joyous ode to "Suppertime," the cheery march-type theme song, and the sweet "Happiness." In an unusual twist for Charlie Brown, he actually gets a couple of happy moments during the last two songs, though he still loses the baseball game, can't get the red-haired girl, and is the only kid at school who doesn’t get a single Valentine card. On balance, it's nice to have this available, but even better would be if a video recording surfaced of the original cast performance (which included Gary Burghoff and Bob Balaban) or the 1999 Broadway revival with Kristen Chenoweth and Roger Bart. The new DVD, available January 26th from Warner Home Video, has one short but disappointing featurette: no video or audio of any of the stage shows, no biographical material about the musical's author, Clark Gesner, and interviews with talking heads who seem to have done about 5 minutes worth of research on Wikipedia. Otherwise, the print on the disc is in very good shape.