When a man in a double-breasted pinstripe suit, white shirt and tie, black shoes and parted hair briskly walks up to a stage microphone, you think you’re about to witness an old-fashioned radio show.
Not quite.
“It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play,” by Joe Landry, is a smart and charming adaptation of the beloved 1946 holiday film classic. Alpine Bank sponsorship has made it possible for the Durango Arts Center to produce this new version of an old favorite. So many actors wanted to be in the play, Director Mona Wood-Patterson created two casts.
The story unfolds through the conceit of a live radio broadcast sometime in the 1940s. Fitted out for the holiday season, the WBFR stage sports a Christmas tree, lights, a platform for the sound effects gang, chairs for eight actors who play multiple roles and three standup microphones. The station’s call letters and two signs for Applause and On the Air hover above.
Before the cast assembles, the illusion of a live broadcast is established. Freddie Filmore (Ian Thomas in Cast A and Ted Holteen in Cast B) walks on as the well-suited, avuncular host. Filmore sets up the live playreading and the commercials. Everyman George Bailey, (played with ease and warmth by the superb Landon Newton) appears in both productions as the central character. It’s his life story as the eldest son of a local businessman that propels the drama. It’s his despair that triggers divine intervention, a life review and a telling reversal.
The backstory is worth telling. According to Rutgers University sources, original author Philip Van Doren Stern, proud class of 1924, awoke one morning in 1938 with an idea for a Great Depression story. Stern invented George Bailey, a small-town businessman so despondent about bad luck and broken dreams that he contemplates suicide. At the bottom of his despair, he meets a mysterious stranger who helps him see his life anew.
Stern’s Bailey is an everyman, America’s vision of itself as good and descent. Stern’s villain, Mr. Potter, represents capitalism’s dark side – greedy, cruel and corrupt. Potter is very much the Scrooge of this story. Like Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” Potter/Scrooge is wealthy, crafty and manipulative. In Bailey’s life review, Bedford Falls has been renamed Potterville; the miser owns everything; the rich get rich, the poor get poorer, et al.
Pursuing the Dicken’s inspiration, it’s fair to say Bailey is an American Bob Cratchit, a young, hard-working family man. He even has a child who is sick.
Whether Stern had Dickens in mind when his story struck, is unknown. I’m merely guessing.
By 1943, Stern still couldn’t get a publisher for “The Greatest Gift.” So he self-published 200 copies for friends. One copy landed on the desk of a Hollywood producer who thought it had promise. RKO Radio Pictures bought the rights for $10,000 intending it as a vehicle for Cary Grant. But the project languished until director Frank Capra bought the rights for the same price.
“It was the story I had been looking for all my life,” Capra wrote in his 1971 autobiography. He said he loved the small town and the idea of an ambitious, good man at the center – and a guardian angel. By the way, the angel takes George to see a tombstone as he reviews what life in Bedford Falls might have been without him.
Capra changed the title and cast Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The movie opened just in time for Christmas 1946. It wasn’t a smash. Only when NBC began showing the movie on TV regularly did it achieve the iconic status it enjoys today.
Stern continued to write books, more than 40 about the Civil War and continued work in the publishing industry until his death in 1984.
And now Landry has given “The Christmas Gift” another new life. In many ways, it’s a wonderful American story.
The production at DAC is well worth seeing.
jreynolds@durangoherald.com. Judith Reynolds is a Durango writer, artist and critic.
If you go
“It’s a Wonderful Life: A Radio Play,” by Joe Landry, directed by Mona Wood Patterson, 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, at the Durango Arts Center, 802 East Second Ave. Tickets cost $15, $10 for DAC members, seniors and students, available at the box office, by phone at 259-2606 or online at www.durangoarts.org.
An audio-only version of the radio play will air at a time to be determined on Christmas Eve on KDUR 91.9/93.9 FM.
