Have you ever wondered what a live radio show from the 1940s might look like in person? Of course, we’ve all seen them referenced in movies or on television, but most have probably not seen one in its entirety. This Christmas season, CATCO is giving Columbus audiences the opportunity to live this experience for themselves with It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play by Joe Landry.
The moment one steps into Studio One of the Riffe Center, they are immediately transported back to a 1940s radio studio that has been decorated to the Christmas season. Old-style music plays over the speakers. It is clear that the production starts the moment the audience members step through the door. In fact, the audience is part of the production, which is explained by WBFR host Freddie Fillmore—when the “applause” signs turn on, the audience must clap. This is a live radio play, after all. The audience is part of the experience that is supposedly being broadcast coast-to-coast at that moment.
The show itself is fascinating to watch. It certainly takes some getting used to at the beginning, being accustomed to the traditional style of plays where the actors are in costume and physically performing the actions on the stage. In the case of Wonderful Life, the actors are playing characters playing characters—the first characters are those of the radio performers, while the second level of characters are those of the story being told. The complicated thing with this is that the characters in the actual story are only distinctive by voice, not by costume. All of this requires a level of imagination that is sometimes lacking in traditional plays.
The cast is phenomenal, not the least because of having to use their voices to act out the story of It’s a Wonderful Life. Liam Cronin, Rick Clark, Stanzi Davis, Mary Gray, and Don Ervin are amazing individually and as an ensemble. Each plays more than one character, whether credited or otherwise and each character possesses a different voice. Each steals the scenes in the background, creating the sound effects or effectively messing up the sound effects. All have a dynamic sense of comedic timing and all are incredibly charismatic. This ensemble is, for lack of a better word, absolutely impressive.
It’s unlikely that you’ll find a show quite like this one during this Christmas season. If you haven’t bought your tickets yet, you’re in luck—due to the strong ticket sales, CATCO has added three more performances. These additional showings of Wonderful Life will be on December 15 at 11:00 am, and December 17 and 18 at 8:00 pm.
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