The Rep opens a play spun from 'It's a Wonderful Life'

By The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

A. Bryan Humphrey (from left), Larry Daggett, Alanna Newton and Amy Hutchins create sound effects to accompany the radio play version of It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play.

ADVERSTISMENT

The choice of "It's a Wonderful Life," a Christmas classic set in bleak economic times, was anything but a deliberate choice by the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, as Jack W. Hill reports in Friday's Arkansas Weekend section.

"It's a coincidence that we chose one that's so incredibly appropriate for what's happening in our country right now," says Robert Hupp, the theater's producing artistic director and director of the play. Titled "It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play," it was written by Joe Landry and opens here Friday.

The plot of this version, which premiered in 1996 at the Stamford Center for the Arts in Stamford, Conn., is the same as the 1946 Frank Capra-directed film. George Bailey, a man with a wife, four children and his own business, has a run of setbacks so severe that he questions his worth, and decides that suicide is his best course of action. A guardian angel intervenes and shows him what the world would have been like if he had never lived.

The play is set in the studios of radio station WBFR on Christmas Eve 1946. Five cast members portray more than 30 characters total.

Read tomorrow's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.

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