Review: Trinity’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’
Saturday, December 11, 2010
There is a deep, secure pleasure in hearing songs you love covered by a tribute band.
The voices may not be exactly those from your favorite group, they might not sing quite as well, but there are those lyrics you know in your sleep, those harmonies threaded through your DNA. It's not the same, and it's not necessarily as good, but it is a solid, satisfying experience that ends up stirring you regardless.
That's what happens in Trinity Rep's re-realization of Frank Capra's film, "It's a Wonderful Life."
A great notion
It's the B-side of a holiday 45 RPM from Trinity: Christmas Carol upstairs, this new production downstairs. It adapts the screenplay of the 1946 film that has vaulted into holiday iconography, and cast it as a radio play. The notion is savvy: a play light on investment (a simple, well-apportioned production design reflecting a radio station recording studio) one set of costumes, and five actors voicing multiple characters.
And, timing out at 85 minutes, this Wonderful Life is a tight, easy-to-manage outing for holiday theater goers. The package makes sense.
Like a night out with a tribute band, yes.
A hell of a story
Because fundamentally, it's a hell of a story, with enough darkness to temper the sweet redemption of the play's conclusion. And the lines made so memorable by actors Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, and the divine Henry Travers as Clarence the angel, are so wonderful, that when veteran Trinity talents Timothy Crowe, Anne Scurria, Fred Sullivan, Stephen Berenson, and Angela Brazil step up to the set's microphones to voice them, it's still magical.
The respectful attack of the Trinity actors dance deftly in and out of the cadences from the film, and sometimes (especially in Crowe's wonderful doubling of Uncle Billy and Mr. Potter) they inhabit them almost identically. Brazil, whose voice in the play is that of Donna Reed's ethereally sassy Mary Hatch, plays her with a slightly wackier tack. Fred Sullivan's George Bailey doesn't possess the scary bolt of darkness that Jimmy Stewart brought to the role, but when you hear Mary say to the exultant George who has dumped the young couple's honeymoon plans to save his family's Savings and Loan, "Welcome home Mr. Bailey," the two productions align. And you cry.
Why it works
That's why it works. The early scenes of George Bailey's youth, the unforgettable "Buffalo Girls" walk and duet, the call from Sam Wainwright at the Hatch home... and of course, the final scene that pronounces Bailey "the richest man in town," draw the production through like embroidery floss through a heavy needle.
Special credit to the blocking of the production, which moves Fred Sullivan's central George Bailey from microphone to microphone, adding depth and three-dimensionality to the story-telling, and although the kiss between George and Mary feels a little forced between Sullivan and Brazil, it needs to happen. More credit to the vocal virtuosity of Crowe and Scurria, the latter who voices Zuzu (of the petals) with such slender tremulousness, it's a revelation. Her God is pretty fierce as well.
Berenson does his best work as Clarence, and the small side characters he provides sound too much like variations on that theme. But these, and other small rends in the fabric, don't add up against the romantic momentum of this production.
You know this song, you love this song, and thanks to this new vision at Trinity, it has new life and body. Go watch, listen, and cry.
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