You're A Good Man Charlie Brown

You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown spends an ordinary day with six children who talk like adults and worry like them too. Charlie Brown cannot get a kite into the air, cannot speak to the girl with the red hair, and has begun to suspect that the problem is not the kite.

There is no plot in the usual sense. The show is built from short scenes: a book report that four children write in four different ways, a baseball game lost by one run, Lucy conducting a survey to establish whether she is crabby, Linus defending his blanket in front of a hostile audience, Schroeder refusing to be distracted from Beethoven, and Snoopy delivering a monologue about supper as though it were an aria.

Clark Gesner wrote the book, music and lyrics, adapting Charles M. Schulz's comic strip, and it first appeared in 1967. A later revision added two numbers by Andrew Lippa. The adaptation keeps the strip's method intact: four panels, a small disappointment, and a punchline that is usually at the expense of the same boy.

It is written for a small company on a simple set, with a piano-led score that stays deliberately modest. The comedy works because the performers play the children straight rather than cute, which lets the anxieties land as real ones.

By the end nothing has been solved. Charlie Brown is still Charlie Brown. The last number is the rest of them telling him, without much evidence, that he is a good man, and it is more moving than it has any right to be.