Snoopy: The Musical
By Benedict Nightingale for The Times


WHAT a quaint and rather sweet little show this is. The performers are dressed and made up to look like children, and yet, as we soon realise, are the kind of children who prove the truth of Wordsworth’s dictum by very obviously being the fathers and mothers of their adult selves. Lucy will go on being Lucy, tough and bossy and set for a life of running everything, from parent-teacher associations to foreign wars. Charlie Brown will go on being insecure and worried and inadequate: the American male in all his awful pathos.

Larry Grossman and Hal Hackaday’s musical has the merits and demerits of its origins, which is, of course, Schulz’s comic-strip, Peanuts.

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Bad reaction to Peanuts
Charles Spencer for The Daily Telegraph reviews Snoopy the Musical.


A few optimistic parents took their children along to the first night of Snoopy the Musical and the poor mites didn't seem to be enjoying it much.

Schulz's celebrated cartoon strip always looked as though it was for children, and in Joseph Pitcher's slick production, the young actors playing Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus and co seem to have stepped straight off the set of Playschool sometime in the mid-1970s. An air of punishing brightness prevails.

But actually Schulz, who died in 2000 after more than 50 years at the drawing board, was never really interested in children. His cartoon infants endured the stresses, strains and disappontments of adults and adolescents.

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