Dog Meets God Reviews

[James2]

Posted: 12/15/05 at 5:55pm

At last, I start a review thread. I'm interested as to what the critics will think. This show sounds interesting.

[melissa errico fan]

Posted: 12/15/05 at 5:57pm

It's "Dog SEES God", not "Dog Meets God"...

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/15/05 at 6:18pm

HA! Yes, it's a palindrome.

The Times is up VERY early for them. It's Mixed:

"If nothing else, Bert V. Royal's scenario is a welcome antidote to the notion that the "Peanuts" gang provides merely a slice of American cuteness, perfect for Hallmark cards or Broadway musicals. For while there are plenty of winks to fans, the spirit of the play has as much in common with "Peanuts" as it does with the view of high school as a Darwinian hell (presented in movies like "Heathers" and "Mean Girls"). Turning Schulz's world into the hormone-infused disaster area imagined by overprotective parents and teenager movies makes for an occasionally funny joke, but it is a cheap one. And when Mr. Royal tries to blend serious, darker issues in with the shockers, he misses as badly as Charlie Brown does with the football.
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When Mr. Royal shifts his comedy toward melodrama, wading into more introspective themes that touch on free will, it's abrupt and unconvincing. "Do you ever feel like you're not a real person?" CB asks his sister. "That you're the product of someone's imagination and you can't think for yourself because you're really just like some creation and that somewhere there's people laughing every time you fall?"

Whatever happened to "Good grief"?"


http://theater2.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/theater/reviews/16dog.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1134688291-IfD+IY9YyyeSfW2cie06Xw

[BSoBW2]

Posted: 12/15/05 at 6:20pm

Mmmm....palindromes.
Updated On: 12/15/05 at 06:20 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/15/05 at 6:54pm

Broadway.com is Mixed:

"Written by Bert V. Royal, Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead was a hit at this year's Fringe Festival, where it won an excellence award for best overall production with a less high-profile cast. While the Peanuts-related riffs spark laughs for the first half hour or so, the play's humor then begins to flag. What would make a terrific Saturday Night Live sketch wears out its welcome over 90 minutes, especially when the play becomes earnest with a gay-romance plotline. Brokeback Mountain it ain't.
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Dog Sees God's premise is cute, and the references to the classic comic strip are clever for a while. I especially enjoyed when Tricia and Marcy imitated their teacher ("Woh woh. Woh woh woh wowoh woh.") and when the whole gang danced like the animated characters in the Peanuts TV specials. Unfortunately, Royal exhausts these jokes relatively quickly, and he switches gears by having Beethoven become involved with one of the other male characters. The gay storyline feels gimmicky and takes the play in a quasi-serious direction that feels forced. Royal fares much better when he plays off the comic strip than when he brings up the abuse Beethoven suffered as a child. Not surprisingly, director Trip Cullman isn't able to make a smooth transition from irreverent parody to Afterschool Special-esque gay play.

http://www.broadway.com/gen/Buzz_Story.aspx?ci=522840

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/16/05 at 2:56am

Talkin Broadway is Negative:

"Good grief, this was a Fringe Festival hit?

Okay, in some ways, it's easy to see why Fringegoers flocked to Dog Sees God in 2004: It's ruthlessly youthful, it's drenched in profanity and topics ranging from sex and drugs to homosexuality and suicide, and it mercilessly skewers the beloved characters of Charles Schulz's classic comic strip "Peanuts," so straightforward, warm, and honest that it can't help but make any antiestablishment theatre maven's blood boil.

But it's difficult to imagine discriminating - let alone mainstream - theatregoers finding much of value in this brutally joyless play, which just opened at the Century Center. This production makes painfully clear something future Fringe transfers should keep in mind: What looks great downtown on warm August nights doesn't always have the same impact in major venues in the cold light of day or the cold air of December.

And "cold" is an excellent word for Dog Sees God, which commits the cardinal sin of parodies (this one bills itself as "unauthorized") or adaptations of popular, pre-existing works: It evinces not a shred of love or respect for, or understanding of, the original. This makes both the play and this production, which has adequate but undistinguished direction by Trip Cullman, hollower, shallower, and much less funny then the comics they try to torpedo."


http://www.talkinbroadway.com/ob/12_14_05.html

Updated On: 12/16/05 at 02:56 AM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/16/05 at 3:01am

Variety is Mixed:

"Theater purists never tire of carping disdainfully about the invasion of TV and film actors without solid stage experience. They must be poised to pounce on "Dog Sees God," its cast bios light on Shakespeare but bulging with such credits as "Lost," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "American Pie." But it turns out the assembly of hot young things is the prime asset of Bert V. Royal's protracted comedy sketch. Director Trip Cullman and a talented design team give punchy treatment to this unauthorized parody of the "Peanuts" gang tangling with teen-angst issues, but it rarely amounts to more than variations on a single joke.
Audiences who find lines like "Holy ****ing ****!!! You're a homo, Charlie Brown!!!" real thigh-slappers likely will eat this up, finding subversiveness in its slender premise and profundity in the shallow sensitivity with which it explores Big Questions. The fevered hit status accorded the show when it played in a far less starry production at the 2004 New York Intl. Fringe Festival indicates a receptive public exists, most of them probably still young enough to be nostalgic for the high school hormonal rampages and identity explorations played out onstage.
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Royal certainly knows his "Peanuts" and has a good ear for teen dialogue, but it all boils down to jokes threaded together in a flimsy dramaturgical blueprint.

The playwright tries in the final scene to make a case for CB struggling to become a real person, instead of feeling "just like some 'creation' and that somewhere there's people laughing every time you fail."

The challenge of seeking an identity, of being an autonomous, thinking, feeling adult rather than a preprogrammed cutout, seems to be the theme here. But this homage-cum-deconstruction of Schulz's sweetly humanistic world of unanswered questions is never developed enough to take "Dog Sees God" beyond the limited boundaries of broad parody.


http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117929122?categoryid=1265&cs=1

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/16/05 at 3:04am

The AP is Positive:

Ever wonder what happened to your favorite comic-strip characters after they grew up - or at least got a little older? Bert V. Royal conjures up just such a situation in "Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead," his inventive, raunchy yet weirdly loving homage to a certain nebbish of a young man named CB. Fans of "Peanuts" and its creator, Charles M. Schulz, will know who he is.
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There is a strong moral center to "Peanuts" and that sense of morality sneaks into "Dog Sees God." despite a parade of slacker gross-out jokes that would not be out place in a trashy summer teen flick.
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With Royal's play, we are a long way from "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," the gentle musical celebration of "Peanuts" that was such a hit in the late 1960s. We're celebrating the gang here, too, only the festivities, despite all the genuine laughter, are a little more jaundiced, a little sadder and maybe more worldly wise. After all, unlike their counterparts in the comic strip, the kids in "Dog Sees God" are beginning to grow up.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/entertainment/gossip/13418027.htm

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/16/05 at 3:06am

Newark Star-Ledger is Mixed-to-Negative:

"It's unclear from the downbeat story's indeterminate tone whether Royal riffs off "Peanuts" just for smarty-pants laughter or wants to say something serious regarding how ugly adolescent life may have become in recent years.

Whatever, the characters have foul tongues and really bad attitudes that contrast with the quaint little people everyone knows from Charles M. Schulz's beloved comic.

Suggesting an R-rated "Saturday Night Live" sketch extended to 80 minutes, "Dog Sees God" has been nimbly staged by Trip Cullman with an eye toward mimicking the various poses struck by the strip's kids. His eight-member ensemble of bright young actors mostly has few stage credits and are known best for appearances on TV series like "Lost" and movies like "American Pie."


http://www.nj.com/entertainment/ledger/index.ssf?/base/entertainment-0/1134713550120340.xml&coll=1

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/16/05 at 3:09am

NY Post is Mixed:

"While the playwright is onto something in tapping into the darker side of the comic strips, his one-joke premise quickly wears thin. The spectacle of these iconic characters engaging in casual sex, drug taking, violence and viciously profane language has an undeniable shock value that is amusing at first but ultimately repetitive. And the play's attempt at a dramatic theme, via a subplot involving C.B.'s burgeoning relationship with Beethoven that results in tragic consequences, feels forced.

The play's most amusing moments come when it directly riffs on its inspiration, as when the characters strike poses or recite lines that are long ingrained in our consciousness from the television specials. And it's fun watching such new young stars as Somerhalder ("Lost"), Dushku ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer") and Ferrera ("Real Women Have Curves") make their stage debuts.

Judging from the frenzied audience response that greeted the show at a recent preview, they're likely to be back."

http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/59734.htm

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 12/16/05 at 3:15am

They're mostly how I felt on the show.

It's good, BUT...

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/16/05 at 3:17am

Theatremania is Mixed-to-Positive:

"The joy of Dog Sees God, the palindromic title of which acknowledges some of the larger pretensions that others have grandly attributed to Schulz's work, is in the irreverence it shows towards something that was always blissfully irreverent in its own right. Not every vignette works, even as directed by the crafty Trip Cullman; Van's pot addiction grows tiresome, for example, while the Marcy-Tricia babelicious competition becomes shrill. And the moralistic ending, which concerns the aftermath of Matt attacking Beethoven for his possible homosexuality, will strike many observers as excessively grim.

But Royal isn't just school-boyishly poking fun at a beloved artifact. For sure, he's taking shots at Peanuts while delighting fans of that cultural phenomenon every step of the way; the more references they pick up on, the more they love what they're seeing. But the playwright is also looking from Schulz's perspective at the screwy standards by which today's teens, tweens, and older adolescents are forced to shape their lives. He understands, as Schulz did, the difficulties involved in figuring out workable solutions. Perhaps that's why the Schulz estate has so far kept mum about the unrelentingly scatological enterprise; or perhaps they recognize that Dog Sees God, in its cockamamie way, honors Schulz's enduring contribution to American literature and his half-century-long insights into the everyday peccadilloes that both plague and placate the common man and woman."


http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/7299

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 12/16/05 at 12:12pm

Daily News is Mixed:

"For copyright reasons, the names have been changed, quite literally, to protect the innocent. Charlie Brown is referred to here as C.B. The piano-playing Schroeder is now Beethoven. All of Schulz's characters do drugs and are sexually voracious.

Ultimately, this is a 10-minute skit. That it remains amusing for longer than that is due to its excellent cast, especially Kelli Garner and Ari Graynor as two strung-out chicks."

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/theater/story/375139p-318785c.html



Curtainup is Positive:

"Royal's pallindrome titled first play has landed at the Century Center near Union Square. It has a new director and cast and probably considerably snazzier production values (a guess, since I didn't see the Fringe version). Its edgy humor seems to be fully intact, along with its take on identity confusion , life and the hereafter. The characters are easily identifiable with the Peanuts crowd yet with a distinctly original or "Royal" touch.
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The opening letter-monologue paves the way for the appearance of CB's friends, all as Les so aptly put it "crafted with lawyerly precision to avoid trespassing while making their identities clear to us." The way Royal builds on the foundation of Charles Schulz's iconic comic strip actually results in a parody that's also a stand-alone play apt to resonate even with anyone belonging to that small population segment unfamiliar with Peanuts.

Trip Cullman keeps the energy pumped up sufficiently to avoid having the genuinely funny scenes from being overwhelmed by the detours into the melodramatic and grim finale."

http://www.curtainup.com/dogseesgod.html