Merry Christmas, George Bailey!

Cassandra Pisieczko

On paper, the premise doesn’t sound like it could amount to much. Frank Capra’s perennial holiday classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” done as a faux live radio broadcast? In the hands of an unambitious group it could easily indicate a way to cut some theatrical corners and stage a show with little or no concern for the usually expensive arts of costume and set design. Luckily, the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble is not an unambitious group. Their production of  Merry Christmas, George Bailey!, adapted and directed by ensemble member James Goode, is a welcome holiday surprise. A nearly seamless and unexpectedly detailed production that successfully subverts formal theatrical conventions to a greater degree than this reviewer has ever seen from the BTE, the play is a largely successful experiment in placing a familiar story in a fresh context. It is a play so good that it is almost frustrating when a few relatively minor problems keep it from achieving total greatness.

From the moment the audience steps into the Alvina Krause Theater they are immersed in the world of the play, Bloomsburg circa 1947, the studios of local radio station WBTE. The stage is dressed in period specific detail, and everything from the glass windowed engineer’s booth to the tubular metal chairs rings with authenticity. When called upon to create a period atmosphere, it certainly helps to have an authentic art deco theater at your disposal, as the BTE has in the Alvina Krause.

Wherever possible the ensemble incorporates the actual technical aspects of running the show into the show itself. The standard introductory talk, where the audience is asked to refrain from photography among other things, is given in character by the radio station host, played by Gerard Stropnicky. The production stage manager and stagehands, usually figures that do their best to recede into the background as they go about their jobs, are placed in costume and add immeasurably to the ambience. The period illusion is entirely immersive, and there is nothing to remove the audience from it until they step back out to the street after the show ends.

Gerard Stropnicky

The script is peppered with references to a vanished Bloomsburg, and the ensemble uses commercial breaks as an excuse for some very funny jingles. This is the aspect in which the play really shines. From a storytelling standpoint, these allusions and diversions are entirely unnecessary, but they texture the material in an extraordinary way. The appeal of the “It’s a Wonderful Life” story rests largely in its appeal to the audience’s sense of nostalgia. Tellingly, the movie version was unsuccessful in its own time before finding a universal audience decades later. By tying the story to our own local sense of community lost and transformed, the inherent bittersweet qualities of the material are thoroughly unlocked. The performance within a performance framing material lets the audience step back from a story nearly everyone thinks they know inside out and view it with fresh eyes. It was a brave choice on the ensemble’s part, not quite Brechtian, but not that far off.

Among the cast, introduced under their own names but wearing period costume, a few performers really stand out. Stropnicky is great as the host and various small roles in the radio play. A moment late in the play where he carries on a dialogue while playing both characters especially captures the madcap excitement of Radio Theater at its best. Cassandra Pisieczko possesses a perfect voice as the sponsor’s spokeswoman—rich and just this side of syrupy, she nearly sounds as if her voice box were an old-time bakelite AM radio receiver. And BTE intern Jackie Macri is entirely winning as Mary Hatch, the love interest. Given a musical number, a tricky business that has felled many otherwise adequate performers throughout stage history, she glides through effortlessly.

Jackie Macri

There are some casting problems, however. The actors in the George Bailey and Clarence Oddbody roles, Kiernan McGowan and Richard Cannaday, respectively, would frankly be better off with their parts switched.

McGowan, BTE’s male intern for the season, brings an agreeable if naive enthusiasm to the George Bailey role, which works for the early scenes where his character is still an adolescent, and reasonably well for the manic and triumphant ending. But he sometimes seems lost in the dramatic scenes that make up the bulk of the play. Some sympathy should be extended—as a young actor it must be quite a daunting task to try and fill the shoes of James Stewart in his prime, one of the greatest screen actors this nation ever produced. For all the talk about Stewart being a kind of boy-next-door presence, a lot of the George Bailey role consists of expressing an intense frustration. George is a character who consistently does the right thing in spite of his own desires. He sublimates his self-interest for the interest of the community time and again, but he is far from happy about it. Stewart’s genius was his ability to portray this downright cranky and cantankerous individual without losing the audience’s sympathy. It’s a delicate balancing act between edginess and likeability and McGowan errs on the likeability side too often.

As he demonstrated in last season’s production of Leading Ladies and The Playboy of the Western World earlier this season, Richard Cannaday is perhaps the ensemble member best suited to such a sweet and sour role. He shines when given the opportunity to play a complex part, and seems to specialize in deeply flawed but likable leads. But here he’s given the more simple supporting role of the angel Clarence and seems almost bored with it. Unhappily, he succumbs to that last temptation of bored actors, the accent. His Clarence sounds distractingly similar to Gomer Pyle. What Clarence needs is not Southern pastiche, but something closer to the straightforward enthusiasm that is McGowan’s natural strength.

Richard Cannaday and Kiernan McGowan

It’s easy to understand how these parts got miscast, Cannaday did just play the lead in the last production and I’m sure the BTE justifiably wanted to feature different cast members in this one.

The sound design is great, especially the decision to feature a live pianist for incidental music, but I for one wish there were more of it. One of the hallmarks of a great radio performance is its use of layered sound, like Orson Welles employed in his Mercury Theatre of the Air productions in the late 1930s, and Merry Christmas, George Bailey! doesn’t quite achieve those heights.

But really these are small complaints. With this production, the BTE have achieved the rare accomplishment of making familiar material seem fresh and vital. This is material that just plain works, and the ensemble’s audacious staging go a long way to reinforcing that impact. The play is heartwarming, fun and funny, and a perfect way to capture the holiday spirit this year.

Nick McGaw lives and works in Bloomsburg.  He is a graduate of Alfred University and the co-owner of Endless Records.

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