Word: comical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...charity production (its take goes to Phillips Brooks House) is an adequate rendition of what is often a dopey, inane script. Just like Garry Trudeau's poorly-received attempt to make his Doonesbury into a musical, Charlie Brown shows that funny comic strips don't always make funny musicals...
...production is a two-act, 14-scene concoction of songs, dance routines, and comic interchanges, each inspired by a facet of the of the long-running strip. They include the baseball game, Snoopy's supper, and Chuck's kite foibles among others...
Director Brian Backus has attacked Edmund Rostand's classic tragicomedy with a battleaxe, only he seems to hit the wrong parts, at least for this production. Blessed with a cast stronger in comic than tragic talents, Backus unwisely cuts the hilarious first act and plays down much of the humor in favor of the tragic, or in this case, bathetic parts. Alex Roe's Cyrano is the major casualty of this approach, though, to be fair, some of his wounds are self-inflicted. He seems to drone endlessly, eyes glazed and fingers fidgeting, in a voice that ought to earn...
Matt Murdock (the blind lawyer who uses his secret "radar sense" to prowl the rooftops as DD) became a real character, a pathological vigilante with a conscience. Miller was questioning the superhero, the great convention of the comic book form: the citizen, gifted by fate, who selflessly puts on longjohns to fight evil. At least the villains use their laser-beam eyes for material gain--what do the heroes...
...good comic book is like all the best shots from an impossibly exciting film, arranged in a way that leads the eye from text to scene to text again. Perhaps comics are doomed forever to the same fantastic subject matter, as it is essentially an unrealistic form. Life is never as well designed as in the comics, the shadows never fall in the right place for dramatic effect, and you never have the chance to narrate your own exploits in polished prose...