A Charlie Brown Christmas

A Charlie Brown Christmas puts a group of children on stage in the middle of December, one of them unable to work out why the season leaves him flat while everybody around him is busy enjoying it. He gets handed the school pageant to direct, which goes about as well as anyone would predict.

The pageant collapses into argument almost immediately. Sent out for a tree, he comes back with the smallest and least impressive one available and is laughed at for it. A friend answers by explaining, plainly and without a trace of irony, what the day is actually for. The adaptation keeps the jazz score the story has always been inseparable from, and the children are played as children rather than as cartoons.

It is adapted from Charles M. Schulz's comic strip and the 1965 television version, and it is short, plain and deliberately unhurried - closer in spirit to a small play than to a spectacle. It suits families with young children and adults who grew up with it, and it belongs in a theatre because the quietness, which is the whole point, is much easier to feel in a room full of people.