Roasted Peanuts
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Local producer Michael Leavitt faces an uphill battle to turn America’s favorite loser into a winner on Broadway. Last November the Fox Theatricals producer premiered a revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, where it won mostly positive reviews. The show then embarked on a brief tour that would eventually take it to the Ambassador Theatre in New York, but after it sustained a huge financial loss in Detroit, coproducer Columbia Artists Management, Inc., pulled out. Leavitt canceled a Boston engagement to overhaul the show for its New York opening, and the producers minimized their advertising expenses, planning a promotional blitz to begin after the show had collected some blurbs from New York critics. But last Thursday You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown opened to decidedly mixed reviews: New Jersey’s Star-Ledger liked it, and USA Today awarded it three out of four stars, but the New York Daily News wasn’t impressed. Worst of all, the highly influential New York Times panned the show: chief critic Ben Brantley labeled it a “mild-mannered, sticky evening of skits and songs,” dismissing its pumped-up production numbers and “hard-sell” performances.
Leavitt sounded uncertain about the show’s future, but he’s been down this road before. Jekyll & Hyde, another musical he developed in regional theaters, opened on Broadway in spring 1997 and was also slammed by the Times. But through word of mouth the show established a cult following, and buoyed by savvy PR–including an ad campaign with decidedly sexual overtones–it survived long enough to find its audience. At the very least You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown offers Anthony Rapp (Rent) in the title role and Kristin Chenoweth giving what even Brantley singled out as a star-making performance in the newly created role of Sally Brown. In any case, Leavitt is already hard at work on his next Broadway-bound musical, a staging of the 1967 film Thoroughly Modern Millie; he says the show is “in great shape” after two successful workshop readings in New York. Back in Chicago, Fox Theatricals is still renovating the Palace Theatre in the old Bismarck Hotel (now the Allegro) for a fall opening, and while they have yet to announce what show will open the theater, it could be Aida. The new musical by Walt Disney Theatricals, with a score by Tim Rice and Elton John, ran into trouble during its pre-Broadway tryout in Atlanta last fall, and the Goodman’s Robert Falls has been hired to direct the show’s next incarnation.
