It's A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play

It's A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play performs the story of George Bailey as a 1940s radio broadcast: a small company crowded around microphones, doubling a dozen roles between them, making the snow, the doors and the ice underfoot by hand at a sound-effects table in full view of the audience.

George spends his life giving up what he wants. The trip he never takes. The education he never gets. The family business he inherits by default, because somebody has to keep it out of the hands of the richest man in town. On Christmas Eve a missing deposit puts him on a bridge, and an angel who has not yet earned his wings shows him the place as it would have been if he had never been born. It is a bleaker story than its reputation suggests.

The stage adaptation is by Joe Landry, working from The Greatest Gift, the Philip Van Doren Stern short story the famous film was built from. The radio-broadcast framing belongs to the adaptation, and it solves the scale problem elegantly: five actors can play an entire town when the audience is doing the picturing.

Watching the sound effects being made is half the pleasure, and it keeps the sentiment honest - the machinery is visible, so the feeling has to earn itself. The period framing is played completely straight, which is funnier than playing it for laughs would be. Then the last stretch arrives and the room goes quiet anyway.

It suits people who know the story by heart and want to watch it taken apart and rebuilt, and families after something at Christmas with a bit of craft in it. Live is the whole point: the sound is made in front of you, a few feet away, and it works every time.