'It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play' challenges and charms
By NAILA FRANCIS Staff Writer
Posted: Tuesday, December 11, 2012 12:15 am
He’s appeared on Broadway in “American Idiot” and “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” as well as regionally in shows such as “Rent,” “Chicago” and the world premiere of the Stephen King-John Mellencamp musical “Ghost Brothers of Darkland County.”
But for all the theater he’s done since securing first runner-up honors in the debut season of “American Idol,” Justin Guarini is facing what could be his most challenging role yet.
The Doylestown resident is part of the celebrated six-member cast ushering in the holidays at the Bucks County Playhouse in a production of “It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play.”
Adapted by Joe Landry from the 1946 film classic, it honors everything about Frank Capra’s beloved story, but, as the title suggests, chronicles his tale of sundered dreams and salvation in a new guise: Its cast gathers in front of microphones, scripts in hand, to deliver the lines of more than two dozen characters, recreating the 1940s golden age of radio live before a studio audience.
And that format, according to Guarini, who has the role of actor Jake Laurents, fuels both the appeal and the challenge of the production.
“The fact that it’s a live radio play — that’s something that I’ve never ever done before. I grew up listening to the golden age of radio, shows like ‘Abbott and Costello,’ ‘The Jack Benny Show,’ ‘The Burns and Allen Show.’ Those were all amazing shows that I loved dearly as a kid but I never had the opportunity to actually participate in something like that,” he says. “To put together an amazing story with such a unique and challenging format, this was irresistible.”
While four of the cast members — Garth Kravits, Lauren Molina, Mark Price and Kevin Pariseau — perform a multitude of roles during the radio broadcast, Guarini brings to life both the young and adult George Bailey, the small-town protagonist whose thwarted ambitions and ill fortune plunge him into a suicidal depression until he’s saved by an angel hoping to earn his wings. (Jill Paice, as Sally Applewhite, creates the role of young Mary Hatch and Mary Bailey.)
“It’s certainly been something that is well outside my comfort zone. It’s pretty much having to really go against all of my instinct when it comes to acting,” says Guarini. “... There’s a certain melodrama that comes with the ’40s style of acting in general, and then, when you go to radio and you only have your voice, then that’s heightened all the more and you have to be very clear, very specific with the things you’re trying to get across, and on top of that, I have to then be aware that I’m putting on a visual play.
“It’s having to juggle putting on a visual play that is engaging for the audience where it’s not just me with a script in my face — because we are holding the pages as they would have on the set of a radio show — and at the same time having to really immerse ourselves in the melodramatic and boisterous nature of doing such a (program).
“It is fun,” he admits. “Where I’m working now, even with just the voice, is to show (George’s) journey in terms of starting off as this young, vibrant, the world-is-my-oyster child to this put-upon adult who is just getting unlucky break after unlucky break to this person who is completely liberated and realizes the full value of life.”
For director Gordon Greenberg, the show’s framework evokes the true magic of theater, inviting audiences into a world whose believability rests as much on the talents of the cast as it does their own imaginations.
“This format in some ways takes advantage of the kind of purity and fun and theatricality of telling the story onstage in a way you can’t do in any other medium. It really is a radio play,” he says. “We ultimately deliver a lot more than that because we’re aware there’s a live audience. It forces you to really listen to the words and to really appreciate the beauty and simplicity of the craft of the actor and what they’re doing with their voice.”
The show also introduces a rarely seen art form, at least from the vantage point of the audience, that hearkens back to the heyday of radio dramas: the sound-effects man who sits in the studio, creating all of the story’s background and accentuating noises.
He’s the guy, says Greenberg, with the bowls, ratchets and mini-doors, with the pieces of screens and sheet metal.
“He crumbles cellophane and it’s raining. He throws a baseball into a dish of broken glass and they’re breaking a window,” he says. “You get to see and really appreciate this guy and what he’s capable of doing.”
The cast is responsible for creating some of those effects, as well, and in this production, also plays several instruments, as Greenberg has included “a few musical treats.”
The director, who recently helmed the world-premiere musical “Stars of David” at the Philadelphia Theatre Company and has previously partnered with playhouse producing director Jed Bernstein on the musical “Working” in Chicago, is using the opportunity to mount the show at an iconic landmark to inject a bit of local history.
Rather than being set in a Manhattan radio station, as it typically is, the location has been changed to New Hope, the actors having been uprooted from the tiny studios of WBUX, a former Doylestown station (now WISP-1570 AM), to do the broadcast live from the theater’s stage.
The commercial breaks pay homage to local businesses from the 1940s who serve as the program’s sponsors, and references to luminaries like playwright Moss Hart, his wife Kitty Carlisle and Oscar Hammerstein II, who all lived in the area and had ties to the playhouse, are peppered throughout.
But the story, which celebrates the lives and dreams of the everyday hero, is still the focus, and Landry, says Greenberg, adheres to it with a script of great beauty, humanity and humor.
The New Yorker recalls seeing Capra’s film on TV several times throughout the year as a boy, as it had fallen out of copyright protection and into the public domain in 1974, allowing any station to show it at any time — which they did — until Republic Pictures regained control of the movie in 1993 and signed a deal granting NBC exclusive rights to broadcast it.
Yet what had been a box-office flop became an audience favorite in those years of repeated showings.
“It became a part of everyone’s vocabulary, but it certainly wouldn’t have staying power if it weren’t such a high piece of writing,” says Greenberg, who hadn’t seen the movie in years before he came to the production. “It’s amazing coming back to it because many things don’t necessarily hold up to your nostalgic fondness or memory of them and this truly does.
“It exemplifies everything that’s warm and wonderful for the holidays, and, hopefully, people will be excited by the story and ultimately believe in it and feel the same sort of joy and catharsis and gratitude for their families.”
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