Milwaukee Rep provides ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ a enjoyable, contemporary radio twist

Thanks to Frank Capra’s basic film, George Bailey’s darkish night time of the soul is an ultra-familiar vacation story. Yet Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s new manufacturing of “It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play” makes it contemporary and enjoyable once more.

Directed by Jonathan Hetler, 5 actors took to the Stackner Cabaret stage Nov. 2 within the guise of radio actors performing a dwell broadcast of “It’s a Wonderful Life” from fictional WMKE for a nationwide viewers. The Stackner Cabaret viewers watches them carry out within the radio studio, dashing between the principle microphone, a small piano and a Foley desk full of devices for making dwell sound results. It’s the Forties, so the garments are tailor-made and swell. In character, the radio actors are pleasant and bodily affectionate with one another, however not developed a lot as personalities past that.

David Flores invests present host and frequent narrator Freddie Fillmore with the right mix of light and heat fussiness. He’s additionally the cartoon-villainish voice of the nasty Potter (the Mr. Burns of this city for you “Simpsons” followers), and of a gaggle of secondary characters. Vocal transitions are swift on this present: typically Flores and different actors have to modify character voices one after one other with out intervening dialog from anybody else.

Daniel Arana voices George Bailey as a stressed idealist who retains doing the suitable factor for others, even when it scuttles his personal plans. This Bailey’s a bit poor in emotional intelligence, although. So enter Eva Nimmer’s Mary, glowing with heat and religion in her man.

Blue Man Group alum Wade Elkins delivers a long-limbed, goofy Clarence, plausible as an apprentice angel. Do I detect a number of atoms of Pee-wee Herman in Elkins’ efficiency, notably in his skill to snap out and in of goofy naivete?

Melinda Parrett cycles delightfully by a burg filled with character voices, together with Clarence’s gruff male supervisor. She will get to sing, too, throughout the industrial breaks constructed into the printed, together with a girl-in-the-moon Miller High Life advert.

The spectacular sound-effects work makes this an attractive comedy (my millennial companion, who does not actually know this story, was smiling all through). But a powerful, dramatic transition leads into the sobering scene of George Bailey considering the horror of a world the place he did not exist.

The Stackner Cabaret doesn’t have a giant stage, so kudos to director Helter and the solid for the neatly executed choreography of motion with and round one another. Joe Landry wrote this profitable adaptation. Joe Kinosian composed and organized the mandatory music that any self-respecting radio broadcast would have.

If you go

Milwaukee Repertory Theater performs “It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play” by Dec. 21 on the Stackner Cabaret, 108 E. Wells St. Visit milwaukeerep.com or name (414) 224-9490. Milwaukee Rep recommends this present for folks 10 years and older.