In rehearsal, I came to see the title, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, as a goal, a destination. Charlie Brown is working on life: he hasn't arrived yet, and often it's a struggle, but he's on his way. His resilience and persistence have made him an inspiration. He seems to know that the only way to grow and become who you should be in this life is to live it. You have to go through it.

Schulz's characters deal with real human questions and issues in a way that has resonated with audiences for over sixty years. We all lack confidence and have doubts at times. We all need to be reminded of our better natures. This is Schulz's genius. It is my hope that our production will introduce Peanuts to a new generation and remind an older one of a cherished friend.

You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown has a complex score and a wonderful book. And with only six actors in the show, who must have the stamina and skill to sing, act and dance, I knew that casting it would be very challenging. I couldn't be more thrilled with my cast and how like a family they've become. I have also been blessed with a design and production team who share my respect for Schulz and understand the challenges of bringing this story to life.

Schultz has written Peanuts in a way that is timeless. This secure foundation allows the music and movement some flexibility. With an eye on the contemporary, I have choreographed in a style that I hope our younger audiences will relate to and, perhaps, teach their folks after the show. I feel it is important for our audiences, especially our young ones, to recognize themselves in the characters on stage. Schultz wrote truth; all we have to do is reveal it. The enduring power of Peanuts is that it reminds us that winning is not nearly as important as resilience and relationships. And that we must never, never lose sight of the absolutely engaged, endlessly curious, wide-eyed six-year-old in all of us.

The gags were simple, profoundly so, with infinite variations: a half-century of Charlie Brown not getting his kite in the air, of not catching the pop fly, of not winning a game of checkers, of not getting a single valentine, of never mustering the courage to talk to the little red-haired girl. A half-century of Lucy snatching the football away from Charlie Brown's foot at the last second. A half-century of Snoopy's fantasies crashing to earth with the arrival of his supper dish.

Every once in a while, a strip might conclude with a "Happiness is a warm blanket," but those were far outnumbered by "Failure Face" and "Rats" and "Drat!" and a "Curse you, Red Baron!" and the recognition - out of the mouths of innocent, pint-sized bodies, no less - of the humiliations of life. "Winning is great," Schulz once wrote, "but it isn't funny. While one person is a happy winner, there may be a hundred losers using funny stories to console themselves."

Schulz was clearly on to something. It is estimated that, at its peak of popularity, Peanuts was carried in more than two thousand newspapers across the United States and around the world and read by five percent of the globe's literate population. There have been other pop-culture titans, but few so industrious. One reaches for comparisons with Dickens and Balzac, Chaplin and Simenon, and Agatha Christie and Norman Rockwell, though none of these would be mistaken for a combination theologian, therapist and philosopher the way Schulz was throughout his career. The only modern cartoonist to have a retrospective at the Louvre, Schulz never regarded himself as an artist and liked to remind the public that he had never even gone to college. He was a winner, but didn't think of himself in those terms.

Schulz, nicknamed "Sparky" after the horse Sparkplug in the comic strip Barney Google, was born in Minneapolis in 1922, the only child of a barber and a homemaker. He grew up loving to read the "funny papers" with his father, and from a very early age, he decided that his life's ambition was to draw his own strip. At the age of nineteen, Schulz began a correspondence course in cartooning with the Federal Schools of Minneapolis and would later teach there. He was drafted in 1943 and served as an army sergeant in Europe. In 1947, using for his theme what he termed "the cruelty that exists among children," he began a cartoon feature called Li'l Folks for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Li'l Folks could be considered a test-run for Peanuts, as it featured an adult-free environment, a dog that looked like Snoopy and a round-headed, five-year-old Everyman named Charlie Brown who suffered through the kind of playground struggles that Schulz felt grown-ups grew away from and seemed to forget. (During these apprentice years he also sold fifteen panel cartoons to The Saturday Evening Post.) Li'l Folks ended in 1950, in part over a salary dispute, so Schulz took samples of the strip to United Features Syndicate in Chicago. Peanuts made its debut in eight papers on October 2, 1950. Within two years, the strip was appearing in forty papers, had generated its first best-selling paperback anthology, and Schroeder, Lucy and Linus had joined the cast. The rest, as they say in the movies, was total world domination.

Anyone e-bidding today on a vintage Snoopy lunchbox knows, and any baby boomer still able to hum one of Vince Guaraldi's jazz themes from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special (1965) will tell you, that Peanuts - a title Schulz disliked, as he felt "it didn't conform to the dignity of the humour of the strip" - was always more than a four-panel reflection of life's vicissitudes. Although Schulz took some heat in his day over all the merchandising and advertising tie-ins, Peanuts was and remains a global multimedia enterprise that generates annual sales of more than a billion dollars.

One of its most successful brands is You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. This musical setting of "An Average Day in the Life of Charlie Brown," with songs by Clark Gesner and a book initially credited to "John Gordon" (a collective pseudonym for the original cast and production team, which made up the dialogue by reading strips out loud during rehearsals) opened off-Broadway in 1967. It initially ran for four years and generated nine simultaneous touring companies. By the 1980s there had been 40,000 productions of the show, making it the most produced musical in the history of the American theatre. One would be hard pressed to find an actor today who didn't play one of the Peanuts gang in his or her relative youth. With Schulz's and Gesner's approval, the 1999 Broadway "revisal" of the show (the version being used in this new Stratford production) added two songs and replaced Patty with Sally, Charlie Brown's fireball of a little sister.

On a simple, minimalist set that mimics Schulz's drawing style, the cast of six engages in plenty of group dynamics - a baseball game, a book report on Peter Rabbit - but each character also finds joy in his or her solo pursuits, whether it be queendom for Lucy or taking down the Red Baron for Snoopy. As in the strip, Lucy tries to distract Schroeder from playing his beloved Beethoven with thoughts of their romantic future, Linus waxes philosophical about his blanket, and Charlie Brown attempts to believe in the basic goodness of his fellow man. And talk to the little red-haired girl. More room is made for positive thinking in the musical, which has a deceptively difficult score. Its irresistible theme song, "Happiness," is still taught in grade school music classes.

Nowadays, TV sitcoms and cartoons and the movies are overrun with mouthy, smart-aleck children. Schulz firmly believed there was a market for innocence. Decades before the South Park kids showed up on cable with their foul-mouthed (and hilarious) satiric swipes at contemporary culture, Sally Brown says in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, "Well, I don't know. I was jumping rope. Everything was all right, and suddenly it all seemed so futile."

The moment is funny and true, more so for being so simply expressed. Chekhov's Sonya or Beckett's Winnie might have said that as little girls. Schulz, who thought his job was no more than "drawing funny pictures," knew that mankind has no choice but to outlast the terrors of modern existence by facing them head-on, with tenacity and courage. Small wonder he was called "the youngest existentialist" in 1956. He may have minimized his genius, but Schulz knew that the disconnect between an innocuous jump rope and the word futile makes for comic gold, and that the painful gap between human expectations and actual experience leads to lasting truth.

James Magruder is a novelist, translator, theatre scholar, professor and dramaturge.