Tag Archives: it’s a wonderful life

Dec 20

Party hearty

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Well, we had pickup rehearsal* tonight. One of our key cast members was absent – he was trying out for “Camelot” in Woodbury – so I got to read his parts. I particularly loved being the announcer, and Mr. Potter.

The restaurant is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, but the staff was having their holiday party tonight at one end of the restaurant while we were rehearsing on the other end.

We discussed some revisions to the script and then began our rehearsal. We made it through the first act and had started on the second when we took a little break to celebrate the birthday of Keith Wortham, one of our castmates. We had a giant birthday cookie. We were just finishing up when the restaurant staff told us they had plenty of extra food – cheese balls, dips, crackers and the like – and would we like to help ourselves?

We joked about having eaten dessert first, but most of us didn’t turn down the free nosh.

While we were enjoying ourselves, the restaurant staff took the chance to take the dance floor (most of the tables in front of our stage had been moved out of the way; they’ll be put back in time for the next performance on Friday) and do a routine.

Anyway, by the time they’d wrapped up, we were worrying about moving our sound effects table into position. By 9:15 or so, it was pretty clear we weren’t going to get back to practice. But that’s OK. I think we’ll do just fine.

 

*Pickup rehearsal is a rehearsal in between weekend performances, to keep yourself sharp, work on any problems that revealed themselves during the first few performances, or what have you. Sometimes, pickup rehearsals aren’t taken very seriously, and cast members take the chance to do their parts in funny voices, walk onto stage in funny masks or costumes, or otherwise try to break up their castmates. We didn’t intend to make this that kind of pickup rehearsal, however; our intent really was to work on the play, since we’d had an abbreviated rehearsal schedule prior to our first performance.

Nov 11

Theater of the mind (brought to you by Lady Esther cosmetics)

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As I explained yesterday, I’m going to appear in a play which tells the story of “It’s A Wonderful Life” as it would be presented on old-time radio. Actually, movies and radio scratched each others’ backs during the golden age. If you’ve ever read the trivia pages for old movies on the Internet Movie Database, you’ll note that many of them were turned into radio plays, using the top two or three stars from the original movie, surrounded (I presume) by the type of versatile radio utility players we’ll be channeling on stage.

IMDb says that there were, in fact, two such adaptations of “It’s A Wonderful Life,” both broadcast in 1947, not long after the movie was in theaters.

I was looking up old radio shows online – there are plenty, at sites like The Internet Archive, RadioLovers.com and the Old Time Radio Network. I haven’t found “It’s a Wonderful Life” yet, but I’m right now listening to another Jimmy Stewart classic: “The Philadelphia Story”, in a 1947 Screen Guild Theater adaptation with Stewart, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in their original roles. The story is quite condensed – into a 30-minute radio show! — which works just fine for the audio format, although it requires some clunky exposition, both as dialogue and from the announcer at the beginning of each act. This seems to have been produced in front of a live audience. It’s one of three different radio adaptations mentioned by IMDb; the other two were 60 minutes in length, one with Ruth Hussey and Virginia Weidler in addition to Stewart, Grant and Hepburn, the other with only Stewart from the original cast.

In those days, of course, once a movie left the theater it was gone – the very biggest hits might possibly be rereleased, but everything else disappeared into the vaults once it ended its original run. There were no TV broadcasts, no DVDs, no way to re-view something you’d enjoyed seeing on the big screen, or catch up with something you’d missed. So these radio adaptations were, in their day, a nice bit of instant nostalgia, as well as a way for stars to promote themselves and their upcoming projects. The Screen Guild Theater adaptation of “The Philadelphia Story” ended with mentions of where you could see each of its three stars in current screen projects: Stewart’s current project at the time was … wait for it … “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

I have, on cassette tapes, the adaptation of the original 1977 “Star Wars” movie which was done for the BBC with Mark Hammill and Anthony Daniels reprising their film roles. The BBC approached George Lucas for permission and he agreed, but only if his alma mater USC was involved in the production. This was done as a serial, and actually includes scenes which were cut from the movie, emphasizing young Luke Skywalker’s admiration for, and later reunion with, Biggs, a neighbor on Tattooine who joins the rebel alliance. I haven’t listened to it since I originally bought it (I also heard it on public radio when it first aired in the 1970s, perhaps the first public radio I ever listened to). I need to break it out and give it a listen.

Nov 10

Dramatis personae

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I’m going to be in a play over the holidays. I can tell you what; I just can’t tell you where.

OK, to bring the story up to this point: I’ve enjoyed occasional participation in community theater, and last spring, I played the lead in “Cash On Delivery,” at the Fly Arts Center in Shelbyville. It was the first time I’d ever had a solo lead part, and a huge one at that, but I had a great time, with terrific castmates and a great director.

This fall, some of those same folks formed a new theater group, the South Of Broadway Players, not so much to compete with the existing group at the Fly as to offer a more flexible and democratic alternative. A few people are already participating in both groups, depending on what they’re interested in trying out for and their personal schedules. I did not try out for the group’s first play, “Here’s Killing You, Kid!”, because the timing wasn’t right. But I was excited about the new group. I attended one of the organizational meetings.

“Here’s Killing You, Kid!” was presented as a dinner theater at the Duck River Restaurant in Shelbyville, with one final performance at a restaurant in Normandy. The Duck River Restaurant was, I am told, delighted with the production, and it did good business. The SOBs (and, yes, we’ve embraced that acronym) hoped that the Duck River Restaurant could host several such performances throughout the year, and then the group might also do a more traditionally-staged production at some point, perhaps using a school theater over the summer or what have you.

The next SOB production will be “WSOB Presents: It’s A Wonderful Life.” This is one of two similar adaptations of the beloved holiday movie in the form of an old-time radio show. Instead of using sets and costumes, a small group of players performs the play on a stage set up to look like a radio studio. Each cast member does numerous characters, and there’s a sound effects man over to the side producing sound effects, with occasional help from other cast members. Little or no memorization is required, because everyone is reading from scripts, just as radio actors did. Part of the fun is seeing the same actors doing different voices, sometimes even having conversations with themselves.

We had auditions last weekend at the Duck River Restaurant. I enjoyed reading the parts and looked forward to the play. Production dates had been set and announced, with performances to take place right before Christmas and during the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Then, a day or two later, the restaurant announced it would go out of business after one last music event this coming weekend. So now, the SOBs have the rights to the play, and a cast, but nowhere to perform it. Our director and producer are scrambling to find a suitable and available space.

Anyway, I got formal notice today that I’d been picked for the cast. I don’t know yet which characters I’ll be doing.

I’ll let you know as soon as performance details have been nailed down.

Dec 23

A long life, and a too-short one

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Well, I was just watching Turner Classic Movies’ annual montage, similar to the one they do at the Oscars, of noted actors, actresses, directors, writers and so on who passed away over the past year.

I didn’t realize that the very funny comic Richard Jeni had died, tragically, after suffering from severe clinical depression.

I also didn’t realize that Charles Lane was, at least until last summer, still alive. He died at age 102, according to the dates on IMDb. Lane had been a character actor in many movies and TV shows — he has 341 actor credits on IMDb, going back to 1933. His last on-screen appearance was in 1995, in a TV-movie remake of “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes,” but he actually had a 2006 credit, at age 101, as narrator of a Christmas-themed short subject!

I will always remember him from another Christmas project: “It’s A Wonderful Life.” He’s the rent collector who reports to Mr. Potter about how many houses George Bailey is building through the Building & Loan.

“One of these days, this young man is going to be asking George Bailey for a job,” he says, which always sounded funny to me, because by the time I first saw “It’s A Wonderful Life” I already thought of him from his TV roles as the ultimate crotchety old man.

Anyway, he was playing grumpy-old-man roles in the 60s and 70s, and I would never have imagined that he was still alive.

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