You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown (1999 Broadway Revival Cast)

List Price: $9.99
Our Price: $6.84
You Save: $3.15 (32%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $3.00 (click here)
Category: Music CD
See more CD details

CD Details

Music reviews of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown (1999 Broadway Revival Cast)

Music Review: Little Snoopy of Horrors
Rating: 1 Stars

Why? For one thing, the new songs don't mesh stylistically with the original songs. In and of themselves, they're fine, but both in style and orchestration, they just don't match. If you want to write a new Peanuts musical, fine, but if this one ain't broke, don't fix it. For one thing, "Beethoven Day" doesn't sound at all like a song Schroeder would sing. For another, the new songs are entirely too polished and pop; like the strips, the beauty of the original songs is in their simplicity, the fact that you believe that they're being sung by children. Even in the orchestrations in this version, they take a perfectly good performance of one of the original songs and ruin it by adding a new ending at odds with the sound and tone of the rest of the song. Why do this? To make it seem more contemporary, I suppose. "My New Philosophy" is the only new piece that even remotely sounds in character, and even that is far too polished.

Performance-wise, it's a fine production, with good voices and musicians, but some questionable acting choices. The usually excellent B. D. Wong sounds ridiculous as Linus with a lisp; he sounds frighteningly like Ed Wynn most of the time. (If you know who Ed Wynn is, you know why that's a horrible mental image for Linus.) And as I said before, Ilana Levine as Lucy is entirely too shrill, too over the top, so much so that it's unpleasant to listen to her singing voice. These are character choices, but a better director might have improved or cut them. On the other hand, Kristen Chenowith is wonderful, as is Roger Bart.

As for the sound mix on the album, it varies from too loud to too soft--though again, the orchestrations are largely to blame. Either way, the sudden shifts from a soft to a loud song kept scaring my child, which is not what this show should do. I shouldn't need to sit with my hand on the volume control the whole time.

Overblown, brassy, aggravating. And just when they've done a song right, they blow it. I was surprised at their restraint in "Happiness," and literally as I was about to say that out loud to my wife, it came roaring back with guns blazing, filling the room with a wall of sound and schmaltz. God forbid we present anything with subtlety. This production, while decked out in a beautiful set and costume design right out of Schulz' pen, misses all the simplicity and wonder of Schulz' writing in the effort to make a Big Contemporary Broadway Show. There is no magic in this version, only calculation. It's no wonder this production only ran for a few months, while the original ran for four years.

It's possible to revive and reinvent a show well. "Chicago," "Anything Goes," "Guys and Dolls" and "Cabaret" all come to mind. None were slavish imitations of the originals, but all of them kept the spirit of original source material, and all had long, healthy runs.

If you want a slick, over-produced, polished recording, then by all means, get this version. If you're only used to Broadway scores from 1980 and later and can't conceive of a simple, small scale show, get this version. If you want a recording that sounds like the Peanuts characters despite being played by grown actors, which is no mean feat, go for the original cast.

Broadway & Vocalists CDs

• Music > Styles
• Children's Music
• Pop
• Soundtracks