There are many reasons why the Christmas holidays, jubilant though they are, can be a difficult time of year. As a critic, the prevalence of the Christmas canon is near the top of that list.
What do I mean by that?
Well, while there are theoretically many different Christmas themed narratives that can be explored there are two works who are not only incredibly popular but who have provided a template that can be copied and repurposed seemingly indefinitely. Those two plots are A Christmas Carol, a curmudgeon is shown the meaning of Christmas by being shown his own life, and It’s a Wonderful Life, a kind person doubting their own importance is shown how much poorer the world would be without them. Both of these works are excellent of course, both in their original form and in some of these numerous retellings, but by the time we actually make it to December 25th we’ve had so many stories of a poor soul being shown the true meaning of Christmas by supernatural shock tactics that one might wonder is there are only two plots approved by some nameless Christmas authority.
All this to say, that setting out to bring either A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life to a yuletide audience is a truly thankless task. Outside of Elizabethan theater there is no audience who are so confident in how the plot will play out, who are simply here to see how it will play out, as an audience sitting down for It’s a Wonderful Life in any form.
But I have enormous respect for people who willingly take on thankless tasks. Not only have Big Dawg Productions found a clever way to celebrate this canonical Christmas story, they’ve even avoided having it feel routine.
The first credit must go to playwright Joe Landry, and the way he found to reinterpret It’s a Wonderful Life for theater. It would have been easier to simply turn the film script or even the original short story The Greatest Gift into a straightforward stage play. But I suspect that Landry knew that such an enterprise would struggle to stand apart from the film and the numerous reinterpretations of it.
Instead, the conceit of Landry’s play (debuting in 2006) is that we are actually the live studio audience for a radio play version of It’s a Wonderful Life broadcast to Truman’s America. The theater actors are playing radio actors who have divided the extensive cast amongst themselves, there’s a sound effects person on stage, and the set is simply a period recording studio. It’s a clever gimmick that creates a vaguely nostalgic appeal to an older time period while also creating a fun piece of meta-theater, and a tribute to the forgotten art of the radio play. Key here, is that it also gives a theater company staging It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play a lot of room to interpret the material.
Having not checked in with Big Dawg since The 39 Steps in September I was pleasantly struck by how similar the two productions were in concept but how different they were in execution. Both plays are about spinning extensive plots with limited casts and sets and both plays have their tongues somewhat in their cheeks. But as opposed to the madcap energy of The 39 Steps, the directorial hand of Robb Mann keeps It’s a Wonderful Life steady, grounded and restrained. This play has plenty of opportunities to go pretty big, but Mann seemingly understands that in this particular case that would be too much. The set design and costumes aren’t flashy, they’re designed to ground us in a particular illusion and to give room for the cast to do their thing.
Now, this restraint is not universally successful. The sound design was an area where the production could have had more room to be more expressive and immersive. Since the Foley artist for the production is a character in the play (played by Kent West) there was a real opportunity to motivate all of the sound design and music. There’s a bit of that and those moments are effective (smacking a baseball pitcher’s glove whenever a character gets punched) but there’s also sound design that clearly exists outside of the world we see on stage. Rather than a digital ice breaking sound effect it might have been cool to see the Foley artist drop a baseball into a glass of ice water next to the microphone or something along those lines. But this was never a full out issue with the play, more just a moment where the production failed to live up to its own premise.
For me, the first sign that we were in good hands was the casting of Randy Davis as Jake Laurents, the actor playing George Bailey in the radio play. Davis is a Big Dawg regular, excelling in larger-than-life roles, but always with a hint that he could function as a convincing leading man if given the opportunity.
George Bailey is not only that opportunity, but on paper is a difficult role to play well, not only do you have to convince an audience that this is a man who would call his father ‘pop’ and say ‘gee’ well into adulthood, but that his rough edges don’t come out of nowhere and that his moments of pathos are authentic as well. Davis rises to the occasion superbly, I was especially taken by the sequence where George discovers that his brother Harry died in the alternate timeline, a sequence that Davis plays with restrained, agonized grief.
Similarly grounded is Chloe Mason, playing radio actress Sally Applewhite, who primarily plays George Bailey’s love interest Mary. Mary is one of those characters who doesn’t offer a lot on paper, but in the hands of a skilled actress there’s a lot of implied personality and depth that can be tapped into.
On the other end of the spectrum are Brett Sicola and Anna Gamel Huber as Freddie Filmore and Lana Sherwood respectively, character actors who fill out several supporting roles in the cast. Their role is such that they’re allowed to go a bit bigger than the two leads, Sicola gets to have several arguments with himself, and Huber actually gave me stitches for a one-off sequence as Mary’s grumpy nosy mother, and both actors rise to the challenge. They never stray too far from the more restrained presentation of the production, but they have a lot of fun. The true highlight of the cast for me was Fracaswell Hyman as Harry Heywood, who played Clarence the angel and several supporting roles.
More than anyone in the cast I had the sense that Hyman was treating the actor he was playing as a character as well. Harry Heywood is a black actor of his time, a man who exists within that limited but familiar paradigm but has found a way to excel in it. Hyman is transformative as Heywood, with an appropriate level of physicality and humor, but also a serious acknowledgment that this was the kind of performance that would have been expected of a black actor at the time. You can see this as well in the program, where Hyman dedicates his performance to “all the marginalized performers of color whose talents far exceeded their opportunities during the Golden Age of Hollywood.”
Christmas entertainment can feel quite routine, especially late into December, but there is nothing routine about Big Dawg’s production of It’s a Wonderful Live: A Live Radio Play. The production lures you in with a more grounded presentation but never forgets to be fun. So good is it in fact, that the gimmick often slips into the periphery and if you close your eyes you can imagine that you’re listening to a period radio play.
This performance repeats through December 22 at the Ruth and Bucky Stein Theatre in Thalian Hall, downtown Wilmington. See this link for de
