This play is an awesome read
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It blew me away. It's meant for adults who grew up with the peanuts characters. It's very funny and hard hitting on the drama.iT ALSO HAS GREAT REFERENCES TO THE COMICS AND CARTOONS.
Just what I needed.
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I had to order this play for my daughter's college class. It arrived on time and in perfect condition. Service was great!
A great blockhead tribute
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I loved reading this play. It was recommended to me by a friend, since she knew I really loved the Peanuts gang. Although it does have strong language and general material, it's an interesting take on what the gang would be like if they grew up in the modern world and are now high schoolers. It's something that is it's own piece, but at the same time, you can tell which characters are which.
PERFECT!
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I saw a production of this play put on by Stray Cat Theatre in Phoenix, AZ and I laughed until I cried and then truly cried at the end. Beautiful performance of an amazing script. A must see and a MUST read!
Welcome to Your Future, CB. You sure you want to go there?
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Burt Royal brings the Peanuts Gang into the 21st century, and it's not a pretty sight.
The characters are recognizable as Peanuts analogs, not just from their names but from their habits and tendencies; even the characters who are merely mentioned (Franklin, Freida, The Little Red-Haired Girl) make sense from the minimal descriptions given them. Only the Beethoven character requires some work for his character to make sense.
The plot of the play involves CB mourning his dead dog, trying to figure out the meaning of life and trying to do right by someone he had known before some troubles threw him into the "Violently Outcast" category. His friends are unable to answer or mourn, and his attempt to right things goes mortally wrong.
As long as the characters stay in their stage reality by using their stage names the action seems to drift from dysfunction to dysfunction. Every thing that could go wrong with Teenagers today, from drinking to eating problems to extreme navel-gazing to bullying to cattiness to lazy religiosity is hit, one at a time with each character. As stage names resolve into Peanuts names, however, the stage reality slips off with painful consequences for all involved. And the final scene will throw all but the darkest of hearts into tears.
The major drawback to the play is that the character depiction seems to require a bit too much of an early 2000's understanding of teenager behavior, and of that only what people consider wrong with kids nowadays. The characters (Outside of CB) seem unable to do more than pay attention to themselves; hence the turn to the worse when one character gets forced out of his stage reality by a name said by another character (One Word: Pigpen).
Having said that, the play is an interesting window into how the Peanuts characters could have evolved had they been allowed to become adolescents. While the subject matter definitely requires a certain level of tolerance or maturity (or willingness to let things develop), there is some hopefulness in the outcome. CB does get some accolades from family and friends, and even a letter from his Pen-Pal.
Not an all-out five-star (don't like what's happened to the Peanuts gang, at least according to Royal), but definitely worth buying (and doing on stage).
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