A Tale of Two Peanuts Programs
- By : Nat
- Category : Classic finds, Reviews
Had you gone to see a performance of You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown at a theater in the late 1960s, you might have had a chance to get a souvenir program like this one:
…or maybe a souvenir program like this one:
“But wait,” I hear you cry, “they look like the same program. They even have the same poor coloring choice, where to make the top of Snoopy’s head stand out, they make it look like Charlie Brown is hollow and has been cut in half by a pair of scrapbooking scissors!”
And I can certainly understand your confusion – to see the difference, you have to look on the inside. Oh, they both have the same transcriptions of words from the song, the same bios of the people behind the show, the same introductory Schulz note… but while one of them, presumably the original edition, has pages like this…
…with pictures of the original New York cast (yes, that’s Gary Burghoff in the center square), the other edition has picture pages like this…
…which includes pictures not only of the New York cast, but of other casts performing the show around the world.
I’d never seen anyone noting before that there were two editions – although admittedly it is the sort of thing that only a mad collector would care about. I luckily happened to buy a second copy while I was working on my upcoming book The Peanuts Collection. And hey, speaking of The Peanuts Collection, it will actually include sort of a souvenir version of this souvenir program; smaller, and wit fewer pages, but it should be a keen little thing to hold in your hands if you’ve never had one before.
The main reason I bought a second copy was that it came with this:
That’s a playbill from the original run of the show, at the St. Marks Theater in New York. It’s not, alas, from the start of the run – by this time, they’d replaced half the cast, including Burghoff and Bob Balaban. (Burghoff was likely still doing the show, but as part of the Los Angeles cast. That’s what got him out here, which lead to landing the part in M*A*S*H which made him famous.)
