Friday, January 12, 2001

SMT's 'Good Man' plays to Peanuts gallery

By LAURA STEWART
NEWS-JOURNAL FINE ARTS WRITER

DAYTONA BEACH — Jeremy Benton doesn't look like Snoopy. The tall, curly-haired actor, one of six characters in "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," the Seaside Music Theater production that opens tonight, clearly is a human being, not a philosophical beagle.

And especially not the sort of cartoon dog made famous by a half-century of "Peanuts" comic strips. But ask Benton and, while he isn't likely to bark or beg for biscuits, he's certain to say he feels like Snoopy -- and that he has for years, since he read the Charles Schulz classics as a child.

"In the musical, I'm a dog from the neck down," said Benton, whose Seaside presence includes playing the Fiddler in "Fiddler on the Roof," Ambrose Kemper in "Hello, Dolly!" and parts in "Children of Eden," "High Spirits," "Camelot" and many others.

"I wear a body suit, but not a dog head -- just my own," he added. "Actually, a person turning into a dog is what I'm trying to be. When I was little, I had a dog named Trudy. She was a beagle mix, and when she looked at us, you knew what she was thinking -- you could see it in her eyes.

"So," said Benton. "I always think of dog owners like me, and try to project what dog owners know about their dogs and how they see them -- as part of the family."

Julia Davidson Truilo agreed, mostly, saying, "We know he's not a dog, but the children in the cast don't ever hear him talk."

Truilo is the director of the musical based on the Schultz comic strips that debuted as "Peanuts" in 1950.

In the past 50 years, the creation of Schulz, who died last January, has grown to gigantic proportions. "Peanuts" runs in more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries. It has jumped off the page for animated cartoons and television specials.

It was translated from page to stage when its characters appeared in the 1967 Off-Broadway musical that became a smash hit before moving to Broadway, in 1971. More recently, in 1999, it was revived on Broadway, and toured widely.

Seaside's "Charlie Brown" won't be quite like any of the other shows, however, Truilo said. "The original production was done without really referring to the strips physically -- the sets were a series of geo metrical objects that would be assembled in various ways, and the cast wore street clothes.

"The revival went in entirely the opposite direction," she said. "It had lots of sets that suggested typical 'Peanuts' strips and costumes based on the strips, and everything had a different color scheme.

"We settled on a happy medium," said the director. "We decided we wanted to have a feeling for the two-dimensionality of the strips and Brian O'Keefe, who designed the costumes, came up with a wonderful idea. He built the costumes on eight- inch foam, so the cast members look very two-dimensional on stage.

"Snoopy was a problem, though. You couldn't put a dog head on Snoopy -- on Jeremy," she said, chuckling at the idea while the actor seated opposite her caricatured a beagle-like cringe. "Snoopy is such an intelligent dog; you need to see his face and his expressions."

And those expressions vary greatly. When Charlie Brown (Billy Taylor) and the gang -- Linus (Rob Cygan), Schroeder (Ben Franklin), Lucy (Liz George) and Patty (Karen Koscoe), treat him as if he's a dog, Benton might pad about on all fours, his doggy tail wagging.

When he's alone, of course, he can wax philosophical. And he can slip into one of the caricatures that make Snoopy so central to "Peanuts" -- and that require special additions to his simple, padded costume. He wears a World War I hat when he's the Flying Ace and his red doghouse becomes a Sopwith Camel in his imagination.

When Snoopy plays ball, he wears a baseball cap; when Benton performs in "Suppertime," he makes it a production to rival Al Jolson. But it's when Snoopy becomes a vulture, poised on an imaginary treebranch, that Benton drawn on his own, human face.

"When Snoopy has his adventures, I move like a lot of things. I create my own reality and act it out -- the Flying Ace, the Fierce Jungle Animal Ape, the Vulture," he said. And he briefly contorted his expressive face into a humorous human ver sion of a cartoon's imitation of a vulture.

That's when Benton became a complex character. He was not a dog and not a vulture. But he was something more than a person: a very funny guy, capturing the whimsical, wisely innocent spirit that has made Schulz's "Peanuts" so universally beloved.

Like the others in the cast, he immersed himself in books of Peanuts strips, listened to the soundtrack of the musical, read interpretations of the characters on Websites like Snoopy.com and allowed himself to feel his way into character.

It was easy, said Benton, and George agreed. As Lucy, she said, "I'm that little kid who knows what she wants ... What's her quote? 'Girls know more about life than little boys do?' I identified with her, definitely. I had little brothers, and I was always louder than they were."

"Out of the mouths of babes," Benton added, and Koscoe explained Patty's character. "She was originally a little blonde, a happy-go-lucky little ditz, I guess you could say. Patty really looks up to Lucy, and she has no intention of ever hurting anyone."

Not even Lucy, the fussbudget whose Freudian side explains comments like "Why, Charlie Brown, you really have to delve." Considering his friend's prickly personality, and George's take on it, Taylor laughed and summed up Lucy: "It's her way, or the highway."

Director Truilo joined her cast in laughter, then added that part of the show's fun comes from the intimacy of having just six characters, all of them Seaside veterans and all of them ready to become three-dimensional cartoons.

"There are moments when you can do the strip, but you can't live in a four-panel cartoon," she said.

"You have to find the humanity in the characters. Charles Schulz loved his characters -- he did the strip for 50 years. So we ask, 'how do you make Lucy likeable?' That's hard," she said.

George thought for a moment before answering -- not as Lucy, but not just as an actor either.

"It's her humanity that makes her likeable," she said, and Taylor added, "Lucy doesn't hold back."

Truilo considered the tricky task of taking "Peanuts" from page to stage. It's complex, and it's simple, she said. "You get to be a child and yet to know everything. Charles Schulz used the strip to expound his philosophy, and it's so benign, so humanistic.

"I asked the company to be childlike without being childish."

If you go

What: musical 'You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.'

Who: presented by Seaside Music Theater.

When: 8 p.m. today, Saturday, Jan. 18-20, 25-27 and Feb. 1-3; 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 21, 25, 27, 28 and Feb. 1, 4.

Where: SMT Downtown, 176 N. Beach St., Daytona Beach.

Admission: $22-$20.

Information: (904) 252-6200.