By Jim Lowe
Staff Writer
“It’s a Wonderful Life,”
The Frank Capra Christmas film starring James Stewart and Donna Reed, was hardly a big success at its premiere in 1946, but it became an American holiday classic when it began airing on NBC annually at Christmastime in 1976. The American Film Institute named it one of the 100 best American films ever made.
For its annual holiday production, Northern Stage, the innovative White River Junction professional theater, will present Joe Landry’s 2006 adaptation, “It’s a Wonderful Life: A Radio Play.” In partnership with Vermont Public Radio, it will be offered as free one-time-only broadcast at 3 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 12, on VPR. The radio play (audio only) also will be available online to stream on demand Dec. 8 through Jan. 3.
“We need it desperately,” Carol Dunne, the production’s director and Northern Stage’s producing artistic director, said of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
“We’re known for our huge holiday shows, and we knew with the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to think small,” she said. “So we thought it was an opportunity to do something small and meaningful. We could never do this before, because it’s a five-person reduction and people want to see a huge musical or holiday play like ‘Mary Poppins.’
“But we actually saw this an opportunity to do one of our favorite stories that we normally couldn’t do,” she said.
This is the saga of George Bailey, the everyman from the small town of Bedford Falls, whose dreams of escape and a brilliant future have been squashed by family obligations and civic duty. His guardian angel has to descend on Christmas Eve to save George from despair — by showing him what the world would have been like had he never been born.
Landry’s adaptation has been performed in many places, including on stage at Montpelier’s Lost Nation Theater for several years, but Northern Stage’s production is unique.
“Once I wrote to Joe’s lawyer, we got permission to change those radio spots, the things that make it a live radio play. We got permission make them specific to our theater,” Dunne said.
Northern Stage created ads touting its sponsor, though they won’t be allowed to run them on VPR.
“So we wrote and recorded them for historic White River Junction companies from the 1930s,” Dunne said. “One is from Miller Cadillac (where Opera North offices are now), and the other is a confection shop, E.K. Smith Confectionery. It was really fun.”
Northern Stage cast the show with people who had worked there before — because they had to get along at close but socially distant quarters.
“We wanted it to be family,” Dunne said. “The other crazy thing is, a lot of people are doing radio plays with people not in the same room. We brought the actors up here because the relationship among the actors in a play like this is so important.
“Everybody had their own table, 6 feet apart; cloth on the table was washed twice a day; we were tested two, three times a week; actors quarantined. It was quite an operation,” Dunne said of the COVID-19 precautions, taken in consultation with Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital.
“The other beautiful thing that happened is that our stage management team snuck in and decorated the whole space with holiday lights,” Dunne said. “It was quite a beautiful experience recording this in the pandemic together.”
The cast included three interns from the Dartmouth College/Northern Stage Experiential Learning program. Music was provided by the local Hanover (New Hampshire) High School jazz combo.
“We wanted it to feel like home — ‘Our Town’ for the holidays,” Dunne said, citing Thornton Wilder’s 1938 paean to small towns.
One challenge was that five actors each play three, four or five characters. Another was achieving some racial diversity, part of Northern Stage’s mission.
“Our (African-American) actor Damian Thompson — he was our amazing Edmund in ‘King Lear’ — plays Clarence the Angel,” Dunne said. “He was born in Jamaica, so we decided Clarence was hailing from Jamaica. So Damian got to use that dialect that he rarely gets to use on stage.”
Another challenge was that radio is a very different art form than theater on stage.
“Everything is about the voice and how you connect emotionally with your voice. For the actors, it was a very, very new skill — very intense,” Dunne said. “It took about a week of recording nonstop. At the end, we layered in the music.
Directing, too, had its challenges.
“It was wonderful also,” Dunne said. “Every director’s fear is that the movie is still iconic. Do you stray with the feel of the characters?
“I was afraid of it when we went in,” Dunne said, “but we brought in a cast that was dynamic, inclusive, contemporary. Once these actors brought themselves into the project, it was really just taking all of the gifts that they gave me, and helping then sculpt the different characters that they were playing.
“So I found it easy,” she said, qualifying, “It was easy in that the beauty that was in the room was so easy to work with. It so worked. It felt like every moment in there was a gift.”
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