Dog Sees God

Sometime on Friday I heard that Xavier Players' production

of Bert V. Royal's Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead was sold out for all shows except Sunday. I quickly bought my tickets and hoped that sellouts meant

the show was going to be a good one. I was not disappointed. At the time, I didn't know the premise of the story and was therefore surprised by the vulgarity of it. It's

definitely a PG-13 show. The plot follows the lives of the Peanuts characters through high school, all of whom are facing serious troubles. CB's (Charlie Brown) dog died. CB's sister (Sally) is Wiccan—well for this week; she seems to be going through an identity crisis. Matt (Pig-pen) is not only a germaphobe, but he bullies Beethoven (Schroeder) for

being homosexual. Van (Linus) smokes pot and burned his blanket, and his sister (Lucy) is in jail for setting a girl's hair on fire. All of the characters curse and drink and fixate on sex. But there is more to the story than that. These characters struggle with real problems—drinking, drugs,

bullying, death. The students performing in this show did an excellent job of conveying that to the audience. Each student fully developed his or her character on stage and made sure that the character's behavior was consistent throughout the show. In terms of the set, the use of the same set of boxes, painted differently on each side to demonstrate different scenes made for easy set changes and a creative design. The lighting was spot-on as well.

I don't know if the music played at the scene changes was originally part of the score, and at first I wasn't sure I was going to like it; however, as the show continued, I started enjoying it. Each song applied to the previous scene in a way

that most performances can only strive to emulate.

All of the props were well thought out, even the food in the

cafeteria scenes was typical highschool-cafeteria food. Beethoven even had a tiny piano. So while I was surprised by the amount of language in the show (like I said, it's definitely PG-13) and didn't initially like the music at each scene change, I thought the students put on an excellent and

believable performance, making the characters quite readable on stage. My only regret is that the show isn't

running another weekend; I highly recommend seeing it (but leave the smaller and less mature children at home).