It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play
Hedgerow Theatre
64 Rose Valley Rd.
Pennsylvania
Dec. 22, 2024
"I used to go to Hedgerow every year for Christmas," the meth-head sitting next to me said during an Uber Share ride to Philadelphia from Rose Valley’s Hedgerow Theatre.
"They would host a whole holiday extravaganza — with the Grinch and the ghosts at the house and all that. Now they’re bankrupt and forced to do all these lousy two-person shows for $80 a ticket. I mean, they’re doing a fucking radio version this year. They can’t even pay for theater anymore.”
I didn’t know if this guy was talking about past stagings of a Christmas Carol, The Grinch, A Christmas Story or some kind of mash-up. But I had just visited Hedgerow for the first time to check out their for-radio-retelling of Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life — and had the opposite reaction to my Uber companion's speculative criticisms.
Maybe they did try to save money by staging a scaled-down take on the original show. But I found the adaptation to be a Christmas spectacular in its own right.
The play stars only five actors, not including a live pianist (the iconically-mustachioed Archie Chestnut). Instead of limiting the show’s immersive imagination, the tight cast is exactly what makes the whole shebang sing. It turns a time-old tradition into a subtle experiment in theatricality.
The production kicked off with Chestnut taking requests from the crowd for favorite songs, launching into overly-embellished, sometimes manic covers of “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” and “Rhapsody in Blue.”
The fun came from the singularity of Chestnut's performance — the inter-audience exchange, the braggadocious trills, the ample errors.
When someone asked him to play “Fly Me to The Moon,” Chestnut declined, quipping: “That song doesn’t exist yet.” It was written in 1954. Inside Hedgerow, I soon realized, it was still the 1940s.
For those unfamiliar, It’s a Wonderful Life tells the story of George Bailey from boyhood through to the adult years, concluding on Christmas Eve of 1945. An angel tasked with saving Bailey from the brink of suicide narrates parts of the plot, testifying to the importance of rescuing the all-American man from the unduly-imposed consequences of corporate greed. When Bailey wishes he had never been born, the angel shows Bailey just how bad everyone else’s life would be without him.
The Frank Capra classic has been dubbed timeless due to its fundamental examination of resilient human spirit. It's also profoundly a product of its time.
Its long-lasting power is, somewhat counterintuitively, based in Capra’s artful obsession with specificity. The show is steeped with teenage jargon from the early to mid 20th century, so much so that the term “hot dog!” becomes a motif amplifying the protagonist’s enduring youth. The iconic Jimmy Stewart plays George, a boy with dreams of traveling the globe and building “model cities” who is resigned to a life of ostensible mundanity when forced to take over his father’s dwindling loan business in order to afford his community an alternative to the big banking practices of the town’s corrupted, unofficial overseer, Mr. Potter.
Inherently a “family man,” George Bailey always puts others first. When the town harlot tells him she wants to move to New York City, he loans her the cash to try it out at his own expense: “It takes a lot of character to leave your hometown and start all over again,” he tells her begrudgingly. It’s Capra’s clever way of telling the audience that what really takes character is self-sacrifice, not self-obsession.
Similarly, the radio-styling of the show is a layered exploration of what constitutes character in a theatrical context.
The show’s focus on voice — in lieu of lavish costumes, famous faces or black and white charm — says a lot. It shows off the old-school skill of its actors while putting a subtle twist on mid-21st century tropes. It hits home on both the resonance of Capra’s overly-emotive storytelling as well as the antiquated worldview his stories are built on.
Only middle-aged stars Jake Laurents and Sally Applewhite are assigned to the individual roles of Capra’s protagonists, George and Mary. A dewy-skinned Freddie Filmore twists his lips into a warped smirk to play the likes of Mr. Potter, the sinister elder taking down a working class suburb through corporate greed. But throughout the show, Fillmore also jumps across the stage like a fully-fledged fawn, transforming into various characters including “Mr. Gower, Joseph, Peter Bailey, Bailey, Ernie, Old Man Collins, Ed, Pete, Tommy, Nick, Bridge Keeper and Binky the Cop,” as the program lists. The two remaining stars, Lana Sherwood and "Harry Jazzbo Heywood," also hop between a storied list of familiarly-named secondary roles: There’s Violent Bick, Zuzu, Rose, Janie and Ruth Bailey, Matilda, Alice the Teller, Mrs. Hatch, Mrs. Thompson and Schultz. There’s Clarence the angel, Uncle Billy, Sam, Bert, Mr. Welch, Mr. Martini, Charlie and Dr. Campbell.
It feels like a waste of space in an already long article to list all of those names — how much could each of them matter?
A lot.
That’s because It’s a Wonderful Life is fundamentally a story about character. First and foremost, it’s about Jimmy Stewart, aka George Bailey’s human commitment to doing good by his father, family and home. But the community members that make up Bedford Falls are just as important sources of character. When a tall glass of water like Jimmy Stewart is willing to stand up for the little guys, the little guys — both individually and collectively — learn how to fill up Stewart so he can keep on keeping on. When Bailey magically vanishes from the picture after wishing he'd never been born, the character of the community is totally abolished. Bedford Falls without Bailey becomes "Pottersville," an empty stretch of strip clubs where our once happy-go-lucky cast is turned into a bunch of drunkards, criminals and “old maids.” All together, it's small town spirit that defends the principle that character always counts for something — even if you die in debt.
Stewart's character, meanwhile, is a trope from classic Hollywood’s wartime era, which frequently paid a young Stewart and other Mickey Rooney-inspired types to star in sincerity-laden dramas dripping with comedic relief about the struggles of well-intentioned men choosing family over fortune.
Laurents, while sporting a classic comb-over, channels both the innocent boasting of a young George Bailey — replete with voice cracks and gushing pace — and the exhausted disillusionment of his adult self. He not only gives the incomparable Jimmy Stewart a run for his money, but perfectly impersonates him in order to demonstrate how Stewart’s lilting exuberance, and not just his lanky stature, once represented an American ideal of unflinching, implicit goodness combatting external, foreign-to-us evils.
The two-hour script is broken up by kitschy faux commercials, suggesting the station is sponsored by two companies touting two equally icky products — toilet cakes and hair retention tonic — through equally upbeat advertisements. The commercials harken back to a time when advertising was a kind of awkward art in and of itself — similar to the way It’s a Wonderful Life could be interpreted today as beautiful propaganda.
Interspersed are also Christmas ballads sung solo by the cast, engaging the audience in a roller coaster of fast-paced transitions between deep drama and slapstick humor. And Capra’s commitment to specificity is neatly relayed through the star power of special effects; the clicking of cigars blasted into a microphone, for example, goes a long way in keeping our attention ripe and real.
While the whole show is otherwise limited to the scripted story, there’s an extra layer of performance embedded into the live viewing. The actors remain in character the whole time, playing the parts of 1940s voice actors while simultaneously performing the full spectrum of Bedford Falls personalities featured in It’s a Wonderful Life. We not only get to listen to a fully-fleshed out story, but to laugh along at the organic antics of the actors — Mr. Potter’s young, charming voiceover jokingly gets distracted from the mic while combing his hair in the reflection of the recording room window or while passing a flask to the piano player, all under-the-radar jokes that imbue an overtly scripted scenario with seemingly improvised character.
The meta-meaning of the show is implied by my fellow Uber rider’s indirect assessment of Rose Valley as a Pottersville in the making. The hundred-year-old Hedgerow used to offer long-term housing for a full company of contracted actors, but after the pandemic took to housing “new, diverse artists throughout the year for short-term stays,” the institution’s Board of Directors wrote in a 2021 letter. This resulted in unfortunate controversy when the last member of the company was ejected from her home at Hedgerow at 74-years-old. Not a very wonderful plot twist.
It's all in the name of bringing quality theater to the people — but who are the people, anymore? My disgruntled fellow Uberer wishing he could afford Hedgerow tickets while on his way to McDonald's may be mistaken about the value of revived radio. But he's right that the natives of Rose Valley are in the same boat as Bedford Falls — so long as there's a leak through which the massive ocean of polluted entertainment appears ready to spill.
It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play is showing at Hedgerow through Jan. 3.
