Croswell’s production of ‘Charlie Brown’ a great show for families

For decades now, the “Peanuts” kids have been beloved by both children and the adults who grew up reading Charles Schulz’ comic strip and watching the TV specials. And both ends of the age spectrum are well served by “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown,” which the Croswell Opera House chose as this year’s holiday musical.

The Clark Gesner/Michael Mayer/Andrew Lippa musical is far from Pulitzer Prize-winning material, of course, but as a representation of why Charlie Brown and most of the best-known “Peanuts” characters are so beloved, it more than fits the bill. And besides that, it’s just fun and heartwarming and family-friendly — all the things you look for in a show for this time of year especially.

“You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown” isn’t “about” anything, exactly, in the sense of having an actual storyline. Rather, it’s a re-creation of “Peanuts” comic-strip moments, sometimes all the way down to the dialogue. And so, you get Charlie Brown looking wistfully across the school playground at the little red-haired girl, and Schroeder campaigning to make Beethoven’s birthday a holiday, and Linus with his blanket, and Lucy in her psychiatric booth, and a typically futile baseball game, and Sally giving a report in class, and Snoopy battling the Red Baron, and many more vignettes besides.

The Croswell’s production, directed by Kerry Graves, puts a really nice cast in place for all the roles: Joey Chase as Charlie Brown, Ali Seibold as Lucy, Steven Kiss as Linus, Matthew Bowland as Schroeder, Mackenzie Fader as Sally, and Nicholas Fuqua as Snoopy. Some of the cast has considerably more vocal talent than others do, and on opening night Chase stumbled through his early lines a bit more than he should have, but the actors all do a great job of bringing their characters to life onstage, which is the important thing. There’s a childlike innocence to each of them — even while they have what can be conversations filled with quite grown-up insights (Linus, of course, is the champion of thinking deep thoughts far beyond his years) — that’s fun to watch.

It seems to me to be true that when it comes right down to it the real star of “Peanuts” is Snoopy, and Fuqua deserves a special round of applause for doing a superb job with this part. He really makes Snoopy a character who steals the scene even if he’s just sitting on the floor watching something else happen, let alone when he’s the focus of the scene, and does it all terrifically well.

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Musically, the tunes in this show are cleverly done, especially ones like “Schroeder” that manage to blend lyrics with Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and “Beethoven Day” that incorporates all sorts of snippets of that composer’s music. There’s a lot of challenging stuff in this score for the Wynne Marsh-led pit orchestra, and for the most part they played it pretty well on opening night. And while some of the cast, as mentioned, aren’t exactly the strongest singers individually, as an ensemble they sound really great.

Leo Babcock’s set design is effective at capturing the cartoonish flavor of the show, complete with comic-strip panels, bright colors and set pieces that have a hand-drawn look to them. It’s especially fun to see that the objects in the characters’ world, from a chair to pencils to a remote control, are all proportionately larger than they should be, evoking the idea of children operating in an adult-sized world. And while of course a costumer can’t mess with the characters’ familiar outfits, Susan Eversden does do a nice job of re-creating those classic looks.

So for most aspects of the show, from acting to music to set and costumes, things came together really well on opening night. But then there’s the technical aspect of Friday’s performance, which had all sorts of problems.

Among some other things, cast members’ microphones were occasionally late getting turned on, leading to some of the lines being lost, and the sound cues were odd; it was often difficult to figure out just what the sound was supposed to be, generally because the cue was too short, and sometimes it was late, such as in “The Baseball Game.” There was a musical representation of the crack of the bat, the characters looked up in the air for the baseball … and THEN came the sound of the bat hitting the ball.

Lighting, too, had a few minor issues and one major one. The first time a blackboard with a homework assignment written on it was flown in, it was hard to read the blackboard because it wasn’t well lit. While the assignment itself isn’t part of the script until a later scene, it was still something an audience member would be sitting there trying to read. And in “My Blanket and Me,” a good chunk of stage left was unlit, leaving the characters on that side in shadow.

And then there was the blackout, when the entire stage was plunged into darkness for several moments — during which the actors gamely carried on without missing a beat — until the situation was resolved in the booth.

Presumably, those technical problems were an opening-night anomaly. Assuming that’s the case, “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown” is a great show for families to attend as the holiday season gets under way. It’s not a long production at all — the whole thing is just under two hours with intermission, making it a good length for kids to sit through — and is one of those shows that’s just fun. Between seeing the cast bring “Peanuts” to life, the classic vignettes depicted and the really charming songs that populate the production, it’s a show that will appeal to young and old alike.

The production continues at 3 p.m. today, at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and at 3 p.m. Dec. 6. Tickets are $20 for adults, $18 for students and senior citizens, and $10 for children 12 and under. A “family four-pack” of two adult and two children’s tickets is $50, and ticketbuyers who bring in two non-perishable food items and buy one adult ticket can get a children’s ticket free.

Reservations and more information are available by calling the Croswell at 264-7469; at the box office at 129 E. Maumee St., Adrian; or online at www.croswell.org.