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<b>by Philip Grecian, directed by Albert Schultz
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
December 15-31, 2016
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Clarence: “Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?”
Soulpepper started out as a classical theatre company but it has gradually been morphing into a replacement for the old CanStage. That transformation has become complete with its production of Philip Grecian’s <i>It’s a Wonderful Life: The Radio Play</i> at the Bluma Appel Theatre. CanStage presented exactly <a href="perma://BLPageReference/280F2762-07B9-4FAD-B9E4-658656C762CE">the same play there in 2008</a>. The fundamental flaws inherent in the stage adaptation of Frank Capra’s 1946 movie have not changed. In fact, in the Soulpepper production they have been heightened and to a story that already has one lump of sugar too many in it, Schultz has added another.
An adaptation of a film or novel succeeds only if it works completely on its own terms in its new medium independent of its source. If an adaption only reminds us of its source without feeling like a separate work, it is simply a parasite. Grecian’s peculiar adaptation turns the classic film into a staged broadcast of a radio play. As I mentioned in my review of the 2008 production, “Grecian thus takes a story from a visual medium and turns it into an aural medium which he then forces us to watch. If we were at home listening to an adaptation of Capra’s film over the radio, we would be free to picture the events in our mind’s eye. Instead, in the theatre, we watch actors holding scripts they pretend to refer to speaking into microphones rather than to each other”.
Grecian’s concept in interesting for about fifteen minutes. After that a certain annoyance sets in because we are constantly being reminded of the movie by its sounds without ever seeing it. Since it is not hard to find a TV channel broadcasting the movie at this time of year and since buying the DVD costs less than the lowest price seat for the play, the question is why Soulpepper is even staging this faux-radio version at all? Grecian has adapted many subjects as “live radio broadcasts” including <i>A Christmas Carol</i>, <i>Frankenstein</i>, <i>Dracula</i> and <i>The Invisible Man</i>. His most successful adaptation, however, is a fully staged version of Jean Shepherd’s script for the movie <i>A Christmas Story</i> that the Grand Theatre staged to great acclaim in 2015. In 2007 Grecian wrote a fully staged version of <i>It’s a Wonderful Life</i> commissioned by the Arts Club Theatre Company of Vancouver which has served as its holiday show ever since. Thus, the second question to ask Soulpepper is “Why choose the faux-radio version over the fully staged version?”
Aside from its general pointlessness, the main problem with the radio version is that there is little of visual interest in a radio broadcast. The prime focus shifts from the story to the efforts of the sound effects men, but how many people go to a show called <i>It’s a Wonderful Life</i> for the sound effects? While the script calls for only one sound effects man as would have been the case in a 1940s radio play, director Albert Schultz has two and, completely unlike a 1940s radio play, has the entire cast engage in making sound effects. Schultz has asked for such minutely detailed effects you wonder if he is thinking of the work Foley artists do for movies rather than the simpler effects that were used in radio. Also, by having the actors make sound effects of cars passing by several microphones, it seems Schultz thinks people in the 1940s had stereo.
What Schultz is really doing by having the entire cast involved in sound effects is to give them all more to do and to give the otherwise static process of radio drama some onstage movement. This is just one sign of many that Schultz feels constrained by the very version of the play he chose. If Schultz were happy with presenting a live radio broadcast, he would have no need of a lighting designer like Bonnie Beecher. The lights go on in the studio when people are working and off when they leave. Schultz, however, has Beecher create mood lighting throughout the show as if it were a stage play. At the end of Act 1 he even has her turn the lights off while the actors are still speaking, which in a real situation would never happen. Radio work would stop if the lights failed. When Clarence shows George Bailey what the world would be like if George never had been born, Schultz has Beecher flicker all the studio lights as if somehow the radio story were becoming real. This, besides spotlighting speakers all suggest that Schultz is trying to make the sow’s ear of Grecian’s radio version into the silk purse of the fully staged version.
Schultz draws fine performances from his cast of 16 (two more than the script requires) who play 63 roles. Gregory Prest is one of two cast members who plays only one role – George Bailey. Prest’s intense performance complete with gestures and general untiedness to his microphone is much more like a stage performance than one intended for radio. At one point Schultz has Prest running in place towards his mic while he speaks, as if there were no battery of sound men present to make the sounds of footsteps for him. Prest seems to be torn between playing the role in his own way and imitating the way James Stewart plays the role in the movie. As a result Prest quite often sounds exactly like Stewart but also cannot be said to have made the role his own.
Raquel Duffy plays her principal role as Mary Bailey with warmth and a well modulated voice almost exactly as if she were Donna Reed. Diego Matamoros, who plays Mr. Potter, the villain of the piece, does not imitate Lionel Barrymore but rather pulls out his standard grouchy old man voice instead. In complete contrast, he uses an exceptionally sonorous voice, complete with 1940s inflections, as the station’s radio Announcer. He also gives what is perhaps the most moving performance of the entire show as Mr. Gower, the druggist who in his grief almost sends poison as pills to a sick boy.
Oliver Dennis is the other cast member who plays only one role – Clarence Oddbody, the angel who has been waiting 200 years to earn his wings. Dennis does not imitate Henry Travers of the movie, but he does exude the same childlike innocence. William Webster’s most memorable role is that of George’s Uncle Billy, who in his haste loses $800 of George’s business’s money and becomes almost frantic with despair. Derek Boyes’s main role is that of the angel Joseph, who is Clarence’s main guide. Boyes uses a calm, sonorous tone that is not much different than the one he uses for his other four characters.
Michelle Monteith seems underused in this production, he two main roles being Zuzu, the Baileys’ youngest child and Violet, a young woman who becomes the town streetwalker. As one might hope, Monteith radically distinguishes the two and makes the Violet of George’s nightmare, a woman alienated from everyone around her and even from herself, the most disturbing character of the show. Marcel Stewart in his first year with Soulpepper gives a confident performance as the station manager as well as the man who runs the local bar.
Given that Schultz has chosen an adult like Monteith to play the Baileys’ youngest child, it is a bit odd that he should choose real children to play Zuzu’s older siblings. Nevertheless, Thea Lapham and Richie Lawrence are word perfect in these roles and are both surprisingly effective as the young Mary and Young George earlier on in the play.
As a director Schultz seems intent on out-Capra-ing Capra by making the play even more sentimental than it already is. It’s probably a treat for young local choirs to begin the show with a carol, but it also seems that Schultz is going for the nostalgic youth-equals-innocence note right at the top of the show. Then at the end he has Prest, Duffy, Lapham and Lawrence gather together as if they were really the Bailey family while it suddenly, magically it starts to snow inside the studio. One supposes that Schultz is suggesting that in playing their roles the actors have so fully embodies their characters and the story that the story has becomes real.
At the same, this kind of gesture only underscore the point that Schultz would be much more at home directing the fully staged version of the play. He could direct the play in the minimalist style Michael Shamata uses for Soulpepper’s <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/D40F2A0D-7DFA-47DB-97F2-C9296FBECBFE">A Christmas Carol</a></i> or Joseph Ziegler used for its <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/548C6B9B-1055-4E2A-A8B5-808B1CF30E6C">Our Town</a></i> and have character change into character just by alterations in voice and gesture. A physical embodiment of the story would provide visual interest and the theatricality that the present radio version lacks. It would also focus our attention on the acting itself rather on the myriad bizarre ways of making sound effects. In this way Soulpepper could make the story its own rather than presenting a show that forces us constantly to reference the visual images of the movie in our minds.
Soulpepper clearly hopes that <i>It’s a Wonderful Life</i> will become another “family classic” along with <i>A Christmas Carol</i> and <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/2B1BA39A-B2B3-439A-92E7-2DA56821A7CC">Parfumerie</a></i>. Without the visual and theatrical interest of those two plays, it likely will not.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Raquel Duffy and Gregory Prest; Oliver Dennis and Derek Boyes; Raquel Duffy, Gregory Prest, Derek Boyes, Thea Lapham, Richie Lawrence, Oliver Dennis and James Smith (at the piano. ©2016 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit <a href="https://www1.youngcentre.ca">https://www1.youngcentre.ca</a>.
<b>2016-12-16</b>
<b>It’s a Wonderful Life: The Radio Play</b>