BWW Reviews: It's a Wonderful IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE at Center Stage

Playwright Joe Landry seems to have created himself an (almost) one-man genre, the "reenacted" experience of watching a studio during the broadcast of a play during radio's great era, the time when radio was the only broadcast medium. I say "almost" because an anonymous adapter came pretty close to pulling off the same stunt with a reenactment of an actual radio play broadcast, 1938's The War of the Worlds, produced four years ago at Washington's Scena Theatre. But Landry seems to have cornered the rest of the market, bringing forth "radio play" renditions of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Reefer Madness, and something called Vintage Hitchcock. Right now, his take on the 1946 Frank Capra holiday classic film It's a Wonderful Life is entertaining audiences at Baltimore's Center Stage.

There actually was a radio play of It's a Wonderful Life, performed by the stars of the movie, Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, as part of the film's publicity campaign. But this is not an attempt to recreate the Stewart-and-Reed experience. Instead, this is an effort to imagine the production as if it had been broadcast using journeyman radio actors in a live-performance studio, sort of as if the movie had never been.

On the evidence of this show, radio actors raised "doubling" to a huge enterprise, each portraying dozens of characters. There would have been no reason not to, given that the audience could not see who was talking. But as we in the theater can see, it can be quite funny to watch, as when an actor is engaged in passionate dialogue with himself in another role, or when a large, mature man is portraying a small child. (You can get away with voice-acting roles your body would never work for.) It also means that the show can be cast with as few as 5 or as many as 25 voice performers, plus one sound effects man. Center Stage has opted to go with the 5 + 1. A few years ago I saw this show at Frederick's MET with 6 + 1.

Another way the show can be customized is in the extent of local color. The Frederick production used what I imagine is the standard version of the script, in which the broadcast is supposed to be national, with make-believe national advertisers. At Center Stage, the production is supposedly coming from the real-life WBAL studios in Baltimore, and includes commercials for Old Bay and H&S Bakery, two real-life locally-based businesses. This could be compared to the kinds of local and topical variations usually introduced into Gilbert & Sullivan operettas.

The cast members all attack their multiplex duties vigorously. Joseph McGranaghan as performer Jack Laurents portraying George Bailey does a reasonable facsimile of the Jimmy Stewart gumption. Pun Bandhu as performer Harry Heywood portraying Clarence the would-be angel among others at times seems like a whirling dervish as he spins from role to role. Ken Krugman as the unctuous-voiced Freddie Filmore the announcer, who also sneers his way through the part of Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore's role) and simpers through others, including a child, probably provides the broadest physical comedy. Chiara Motley as performer Sally Applewhite portraying George's wife Mary and others does a fine variation on Donna Reed's role, more incipient matriarch than ingénue. And Eileen Rivera as performer Lana Sherwood portraying Violet and others, makes wonderful hay of a clutch of character roles. Nor would it be fair to overlook the "plus 1," Foley artist Anthony Stultz, who spins the turntable, slams doors, rings bells, and plays the guitar, as need be, to support the ambience the work requires.

Director Nelson T. Eusebio III's approach to staging can be best described as uninhibited. The performers quickly dump pages, then clumps of the script all around the stage and toss them over the apron into the audience, and soon mostly abandon their scripts and their clunky microphones altogether, more freely recreating the physical space and the action of the movie/story than standing behind mikes in a mere studio would allow. Yet in some ways we are still in the studio, with the same five actors voicing all the roles. This two-settings-at-once approach is a bit reminiscent of what Olivier did in his Henry V movie, where the audience was simultaneously in the Globe Theater and in cinematically-rendered fields of France. And like Shakespeare's "wooden O," the WBAL studio includes both performers and audience. "APPLAUSE" lights encourage the Center Stage audience to respond not merely as itself today but also as the old-timey audience in the studio. And at the end, the audience for this show is pulled not merely into the studio but into Bedford Falls, as the stage snow falls not only on the characters in the story set there but on the performers in the studio and on the audience as well. It is a perfectly magical double fourth-wall violation.

Indeed, to state what must already be obvious, this whole show is perfectly magical. It has everything an audience wants in a holiday play: kid-friendliness, humor, pathos, a few tugs at the heartstrings and the tear glands, and some seasonal references. Add the customary polished Center Stage staging, and what could be wrong?

(Well, I can think of one thing, to return to a theme I've expressed several times in these pages: not one of the performers has ever trodden the boards at Center Stage before. Since the script requires the actors to be chameleons anyway, it's not as if unique qualifications are called for. There is no obvious pressing reason local actors or at least Center Stage veterans couldn't have been chosen for at least some of these parts. What was Casting Director Stephanie Klapper thinking? That said, if we're going to have a cast of unfamiliar faces, these do very well.)

A closing thought. The wonder of a holiday show should be seen through juvenile eyes as well as grown-up ones. It was a pleasure, therefore, to observe some children in the audience, of whom there are seldom enough at Center Stage. I personally kid-tested the show with a helpful grandson, who professed himself completely satisfied. What greater recommendation could there be?

It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, adapted by Joe Landry from Frank Capra's script for a movie based on a story by Philip Van Doren Stern, directed by Nelson T. Eusebio III, at Center Stage, 700 North Calvert Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21202, through December 21, with special family matinees November 29, December 7, 13, and 20. Tickets $19 - $64, www.centerstage.org, 410.332.0033. Family-friendly.

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