Good grief! It’s Charlie Brown

Circus elephants and carnival concessions have left the Ector County Coliseum, but there's still plenty of "Peanuts" next door at the Permian Playhouse - where things have gotten a little Snoopy.

It's been nearly 58 years since the classic "Peanuts" comic strip debuted in newspapers, but the legacy of the late Charles M. Schulz lives on - and the Playhouse stage is packed with his familiar characters this weekend and next.

"You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," the 1999 musical revision by Clark Gesner, Michael Mayer and Andrew Lippa, opens tonight as a small cast unveils an average day in the life of Charlie Brown.

Director Chad Cazee said the show is made up of short vignettes - little moments picked from the daily life that Schulz gave his animated superstar Charlie Brown.

"The whole show is little comedic bits," Cazee said. "And everything on the set's oversized so it looks very cartoonish."

From baseball season to a Valentine's Day mess-up, members of the Kaleidoscope Company retell some classic happenings of the "Peanuts" gang in a musical skit formation.

Hope Boyer, 16, plays Lucy van Pelt in the show and the aspiring actress said she has fun altering her voice for the part.
"It's cute, and it's fun - it's also fun playing bratty 7 years old," she said. "I think my favorite thing is I get to say, ‘Blockhead' so many times."

Boyer said she's used to seeing "Peanuts" characters in holiday animation specials or reading the newspaper comic strips, but Caleb Williams, who plays Charlie Brown, said he wasn't so familiar them.

Still, the 13-year-old actor said he learned to appreciate Schulz's comedic sense with his character's misfortune.

"In the Valentine's Day scene, he's practicing giving Lucy a valentine, but he keeps messing it up," Williams said. "A bunch of bad stuff happens to him, but he always tries to look up - he's an optimist."

Boyer said Charlie Brown's life is so ridiculously unsuccessful that it presents humorous relief to the audience and provokes the same down-to-earth insight that Schulz printed for years.

"Because it's such a classic, it's important to keep around," she said.