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| Liz O'Neal, Carter Cole, Dean Stolber, Lee Wilson, Stephen Fenning, Grant Cowan. (Photos: Martha Swope.) |
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| Stephen Fenning, Liz O'Neal. |
The enormously
successful, 1,597-performance, Off-Broadway production of Charles Schultz’s
widely popular “Peanuts” comic strip closed in February 1971. Several months later it was revived on Broadway. The cast was not up to the original,
wrote Mel Gussow, but Clive Barnes, reviewing it on the radio, said it had
“neither suffered nor been changed.” Other reviews were similarly positive.
Still, it failed to click in its larger quarters and closed in a month.
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| Lee Wilson, Grant Cowan. |
The cast members were
Stephen Fenning, Dean Stolber, Lee Wilson, Carter Cole, Grant Cowan, and Liz
O’Neal.
Do you enjoy Theatre’s Leiter Side? As you may know, since New York’s theatres were forced into hibernation by Covid-19, this blog has provided daily posts on the hundreds of shows that opened in the city, Off and on Broadway, between 1970 and 1975. These have been drawn from an unpublished manuscript that would have been part of my multivolume Encyclopedia of the New York Stage series, which covers every show, of every type, from 1920 through 1950. Unfortunately, the publisher, Greenwood Press, decided it was too expensive to continue the project beyond 1950.
Before I began offering these 1970-1975 entries, however, Theatre’s Leiter Side posted over 1,600 of my actual reviews for shows from 2012 through 2020. The first two years of that experience were published in separate volumes for 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 (the latter split into two volumes). The 2012-2013 edition also includes a memoir in which I describe how, when I was 72, I used the opportunity of suddenly being granted free access to every New York show to begin writing reviews of everything I saw. Interested readers can find these collections on Amazon.com by clicking here.
