A fixture of the holiday entertainment season is those perennial reruns of It's a Wonderful Life. The beloved movie has now found its way onto the stage, in not one but two quite different dramatizations. One of them fills the stage with 53 performers, and one does the whole thing with just seven. One pretty faithfully recreates the original, and one re-imagines it as an old-time radio drama.
If you've been under a rock for the last 62 years, you need to know that It's a Wonderful Life tells the irresistibly sentimental story of George Bailey, a small-town fellow who dreams of going places and doing great things, but never gets out of town. Instead, he marries a hometown girl and manages the family's savings and loan. Then, when the business is on the edge of ruin and he's on the brink of suicide, he's saved by a guardian angel who shows him all the ways he has touched people's lives. The old chestnut has renewed relevance this year, since one of its plot points revolves around home ownership and a bank failure.
Frank Capra's black-and-white classic was filmed in 1946, and that's when the radio version takes place. We're in a New York City sound studio on Christmas Eve. A group of actors, a sound-effects man and an offstage organist are poised to perform for a studio audience and a nationwide network of listeners. The six actors, scripts in hand, line up at a row of microphones. They are dressed in '40s fashions—the men in double-breasted suits and Brylcreem, the women in shoulder-padded dresses, flowered hats and Andrews Sisters hairdos.
The defining ingredient of radio drama—and one of the most intriguing elements in this stage production—is the sound effects that conjure up the action we can't see. Stacked on and around a large table on one side of the Majestic Theater's stage is a motley collection of noisemaking props: a large turning drum covered with a sheet of muslin to create a wind effect, a tin thunder sheet, a black rotary-dial telephone, a midget door.
Joe Landry's script is an abbreviated transcription of the screenplay, with added narration to cover some transitions and without a couple of the film's particularly visual sequences. Cate Damon's production at the Majestic Theater in West Springfield is the second outing for what looks to be an annual event.
The versatile cast of professionals, headed by David Mason as George, evoke the movie's indelible performances without imitating them. In true old-time radio fashion, most of the performers play multiple roles. Dick Volker is the narrator and a dozen more characters. Sandra Blaney, Margaret Reilly and Barbara McEwen (hilarious as an imperious movie star slumming in the radio medium) divvy up the women's roles. Van Farrier tops them all with 15 different voices, including a couple of times when he plays all the characters in a scene.
Tom Knightlee is wonderfully droll as the eager, nervous sound-effects man, opening and slamming doors, ringing a cash register, splashing water when George's little brother falls through the ice, donning high heels to walk down a length of sidewalk as sexy Violet Bick.
Small-Town Epic
Stephen Stearns has been waiting quite some time to stage It's a Wonderful Life at the New England Youth Theatre, which he founded 10 years ago. It just wasn't possible to fit it into the company's previous home, a little storefront on Brattleboro's Main Street. But last year, the troupe moved into an expansive new theater space that can accommodate this small-town epic with a cast of 50-plus, multiple locations and 300 costumes.
While this version sticks quite closely to the original, there's one big change. The fictional town of Bedford Falls has become the real city of Brattleboro, represented in vintage photos projected on a big screen at the rear of the stage, which lend a lovely period look to the piece.
The half-a-hundred performers range from tiny tots to 20-something alumni of the program. In two of the leads, you can detect the influence of the film's performances. Taylor Patno, as Clarence, George's guardian angel, adopts the diffident mannerisms of his model, Henry Travers. And just as we can hear Jimmy Stewart's signature drawl in David Mason's radio performance, young Riley Goodemote has the original star's lanky frame and boyish charm. But Goodemote, like Mason, recalls the original without impersonating him, and nicely captures George's gift for friendship and instinctive open-heartedness.
I'll pick just one more player out of this overflowing, energetic ensemble. I liked Allie Bliss even better than Donna Reed as George's wife, Mary. Her sweetness is less saccharine, her motherliness more natural and her worry in George's moment of crisis more convincing.
On opening night last week, things were still a little rough. The platforms that slide on and off the stage with the furniture for the various scenes didn't always work quite right, and one actor missed an entrance cue by a long, anxious minute. But the curtain speech, given by one of the alums, invited us to join into the spirit of the show, and we didn't need a second invitation. When a chair teetered on the edge of a platform, threatening to tip its occupant over the edge, almost the entire audience in unison called out to warn him.
Stephen Stearns' production basically puts the whole screenplay on stage, cutting hardly a line and changing things only when it's impossible to recreate the movie. (The cast doesn't jump into a swimming pool—they're drenched by a fire hose.) But editing the sacred text a bit would help with the running time (almost two and a half hours), and I actually liked best the moments when the production acknowledged being a stage play, like changing the sledding accident on the icy pond into a slip when jumping across a stream.
These two productions' disparity in scale and approach underlines the movie's universal appeal and the power of its simple, moving story. Both versions, in their different ways, do justice to the material without making us just want to see the original instead. And both of them managed to put a lump in my throat."
It's a Wonderful Life: at the New England Youth Theatre, 100 Flat St., Brattleboro, Vt., through Dec. 21, (802) 246-6398, neyt.org. And at the Majestic Theater, 131 Elm St., West Springfield, through Dec. 21, (413) 747-7797, majestictheater.com.
