It's A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play

Vintage kid pile tableau.

Confession 1: Up until three weeks ago, I had never seen as much as 1 minute of the film "It's A Wonderful Life". This is what I knew-- 1940s tall-man Jimmy Stewart plays a dude with a lot of kids who is generally disgrunted with everything and needs the help of an angel named Clarence, who obviously does a good job because in the end our vertically-ample hero is standing in his swarm of offspring, the tiniest of whom chirps the famous lines about bells and wings and Jimmy gargles out "Atta boy, Clarence!" and the thing ends in a charming tableau. That was the extent of my "It's A Wonderful Life" knowledge.

Until three weeks ago, when I got an email from Jack at Blackfriars, asking me if I would accept the role of Mary Bailey in their holiday production of "It's A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play". My initial reaction was "oh man I just finished performance of 'Working' at the JCC and Jeff just finished marching band season and it's literally the first week I've had since August when I don't have to be in rehearsals every single night do I really want to commit to another month of rehearsals followed by another month of performances on top of the 8 work-related events that I have to run at Geva this holiday season I feel like I completely missed Autumn 2012 and what if I miss Holidays 2012 because I'm just jumping from show to show gaaaaaahhhhd I just wanna sleep and sit on my couch but I love theatre and opportunities what should I dooooooooo????". That was literally the run-on sentence that played on loop in my head. Fortunately, Jack assured me that the time-commitment would be minimal and said the following magic words: "Jake Purcell is playing George Bailey".

This is Jake Purcell.

Meow. I met Jake last year when he was acting in "The Mystery of Irma Vep" and I was hanging around the theatre to teach a drag queen a rap I had written about Hamlet for the show (I realize how odd that statement sounds, but it is completely true). Our paths crossed again when he was cast as "Joe Kennedy" in Grey Gardens last May, which I worked backstage on. Finally, this was our chance to share the staaaahge! So I said "yes" and jumped onboard the "It's A Wonderful Life" train. The day before the read-through, I made Jeff go to Record Archive with me so I could purchase a VHS copy of the movie, so I wouldn't completely embarrass myself in the first rehearsal when everyone else knew who they were playing and what was going on and I didn't. Due to my crazy schedule, I managed to watch the first half and felt pretty okay about how I was going to do "Mary Bailey"- at least for the first rehearsal!

We started rehearsals with a read-through on November 14th and determined our rehearsal schedule-- I would only be needed at 10 short rehearsals before we opened on December 7th! AND, the rest of the cast is amazing-- Jake "I am very tall" Purcell, Peter Doyle (who I got to work with in Sunday in the Park last summer), Brian Doran (who I met when he was in Grey Gardens), and Linda Gallagher Loy (who I had never met, but who is a hilarious peach of a woman)- so much hysterical laughter which this bunch! AND, because it's supposed to be a live radio play, we would be reading our lines on loose pages in our hands during performances! So no memorization needed! AND, because it's a live radio play with a set consisting of some chairs on either side of two old-fashioned microphones, there would be no blocking to learn! Ummmm.... talk about a BREEZE! Add in that I am one of the two people in the cast who just play one character (poor Brian, Peter and Linda each play around 5-10 characters), and you've got the easiest theatre process I could possibly imagine! Hopefully it stays easy at tonight's rehearsal, the first and final dress rehearsal-- one never knows what can happen when you add gloves, heels and a wig (red, of course) to the mix...


Confession 2: I STILL haven't seen the whole movie.


Also, this is what Jake looks like when he's not smoldering at cameras:

Now you understand my eagerness to act opposite this man.