IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE: A LIVE RADIO PLAY
ADAPTED BY JOE LANDRY
DIRECTED BY JACOB JANSSEN
DECEMBER 13 – 31, 2023
Wednesday, December 13: Pay-What-You-Will Preview
Thursday, December 14: Final Preview (ticketed)
Friday, December 15: Opening Night
Wednesday – Saturday evenings at 7:30pm
Friday matinee December 22nd at 2:00pm
Sunday matinees at 2:00pm
Saturday 12/30 matinee added!
Don’t touch that dial! The WBFR Radio Players are back with another holiday classic!
With the help of a musician and foley artist, a top-notch ensemble of actors once again brings a few dozen personalities to captivating life in this 1940s radio broadcast. Based on the story, The Greatest Gift by Philip Van Doren Stern, the moving tale of idealistic George Bailey unfolds, as he considers his fate – and the fate of all the colorful characters in Bedford Falls – one eventful Christmas Eve. The entire family will enjoy this unique spin on one of America’s favorite films!
A Personal Note,
“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a story near and dear to my heart. For Christmas, we’d go down to Chicago to visit my Grandma Nerren and the rest of the Nerren family. And pretty much every year, we’d watch the 1946 Frank Capra classic “It’s a Wonderful Life”. This movie and Jimmy Stewart’s performance are basically burned into my brain; I can so easily visualize each scene and hear the tape play back in my mind. It’s such a well rounded, complicated, emotional journey and quite frankly hits on the dark subject matter of suicide in a very real way. As a kid growing up, I didn’t have too many relatable life experiences with suicide (thankfully), but as I’ve gotten older and every few years suicide touches my life, whether a family member, or a friend, or a bandmate – this aspect hits home way more than it used to. Also, as one tries to navigate personal purpose and career path in life, this movie just feels more and more relatable. I think that’s a big part of why it has stuck around and stood the test of time. It’s not your typical holiday hallmark fluff, this story feels real. It’s takes a look at what really matters in your life: your family, your community, the well being of those around you physically & mentally, as well as their housing and opportunities; and appreciating all that you already have in your life. I’m thrilled and blessed to get to perform this story all December at TAP this year!
This performance is lovingly dedicated to my Nerren clan – Hee Haw and Merry Christmas!!
🎅🎄❤️❤️
“It’s a Wonderful Life” TAP Community Partner:
Third Avenue Playworks pairs a Community Partner with every production they do and on the 1st Wednesday preview of the show, all of the proceeds from ticket sales are donated to that organization! This show’s community partner is Chop “N” Shop With a Cop; and on our Wednesday preview, TAP raised over $1,600 dollars to donate to the program!! I think that was TAP’s best donation haul yet. Thanks to everyone who came to that preview, the spirit in the hall was lively as their giving!
From the organization: “Founded in 2003 by Sheriff Tammy Sternard. This program provides a day of tree cutting, shopping for Christmas gifts for family members, wrapping the gifts, and just plain fun for 30 children from area Door County schools. For more information, please feel free to call with any questions at 920-746-2424. Thank you to all who helped in any way to make this years Chop “N” Shop With a Cop Program such a huge success.”
The Live Foley Sound Design
One main difference between this show and “Christmas Carol: A Live Radio Play” is the sheer amount of objects needed for the live Foley sound design to be performed. Last year we were able to make multiple uses out of less objects, but in the “It’s a Wonderful Life” script, there are just so many more individual sound effects that only happen once. There has to be at least double the amount of foley objects this year (if not more)! There are about 160 sound effect cues in the show and roughly 55 sound effect objects on stage; most of the foley objects only get used once or twice during the show! It’s a lot more to keep track of and pre-set, because of that Jacob (the director) and I really wanted to have the Actors handle as much of those cues as possible. We knew it’d be fun and visually more exciting for the audience to see the actors bouncing around the stage between lines to handle sound effects. Honestly, there are many times where 3 or 4 sounds happen overlapping or in quick succession and it would be near impossible for one foley artist to make all of those sounds anyway. Add on top of that, the sound effect cues very frequently overlap with the music cues marked in the script. There’s no way I could play a music cue and do 2-3 foley sounds concurrently. I’m already jumping from cello to glockenspiel to guitar like a madman as it is! Because the majority of these objects are used only once in the show, it makes this year’s production so much more sonically engaging. We hope you enjoy the incredible amount of unique sounds!
Foley Sound Objects for this production: door slam, wind machine, wash tub basin with cake lid, small cloth, metal cooler, celery, sugar glass, hammer, metal trash can lids, wind chimes, chimes bell, door with shop bell, men’s dress shoes, women’s high heels, glockenspiel and various mallets, toy piano, folk table harp, dulcimer hammers, cup with coins, glass jar, glass with soy beans, metal tin with soy beans, spoon, police whistle, crank siren, whiz whistle, triangle, prop phone, telephone bell, rotary dial and extension phone, analog metronome, wood box with removable top, beer bottles, high ball glasses, cajon, cajon brushes, wooden train whistle, zippo lighter, deposit bag, newspaper, metal container with spoon, cash box, cashier’s bell, car horn, gavel, aux percussion with ridges, harmonica, thunder tube, paperback books, deck of cards with rubber band, hot water bottle (the rubber “hot pad” fillable/inflatable kind), individual Christmas bells, silverware and plates, cornstarch in a nylon…
and… I think that’s everything! Roughly 57 objects listed! 🤯
For the audio nerds, I tried a new technique in mic’ing up the Foley table this year in order to get more coverage. I’m going with a Mid/Side configuration. I have a condenser mic as my “mid” mic pointing straight at me (behind the table) and this diaphragm actually does pic up quite a lot of the table. It’s what I used exclusively last year, though we’d sometimes turn the mic to highlight sounds coming from different parts of the table. But this year behind that mic, I have a figure 8 pattern Ribbon mic as my “sides” mic, and it absolutely fits the 1940’s radio vibe. This ribbon mic has the grills facing to the left and right side of the table to pick up all of the things happening on either side of the condenser mic. We’re really happy with how this Mid/Side setup worked out for the production this year!
The Music: LUX 1947 Radio Play Score & Folk Music
Last year, for “Christmas Carol: A Live Radio Play” I played music cues on cello and Treble Viola da Gamba, as well as glockenspiel. The main reason I chose the viol as a featured musical instrument was to capture the Dickensian 19th Century flavor of that story. The viol with it’s gut strings and sweet earthy tones really imbue the air with the textures of an older time. of centuries long past. This year I went in a totally different direction with the music cues, in two ways…
First of all, there is was an amazing recorded document of this story with both of the leads Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed reprising their starring roles from the 1946 film live on air as radio play!!!! I mean, come on, jackpot!! They were actually doing this live radio play version on Lux to promote the movie! So I went ahead and transcribed ALL of the music cues from this 1947 Lux Radio Theater production of “It’s a Wonderful Life”. I must say that I love the style of these cues, they were so much fun to transcribe and a blast to play on cello. They are so thick with the lyric style and tonal characteristics of the 1940’s-1950’s orchestral era.
One thing that shocked me was how little Foley sound design was in the 1947 Lux Radio production and just how sweeping and lush the 1940’s orchestral music was! Luckily, most of the music cues in the Lux show lined up exactly with the calls for music cues in the Joe Landry script (which is left up totally to the sound designer to decide what music to create or use). I first prepared all of the Lux music cues on solo cello, then Jacob and I decided to just try all of them in rehearsal to see which cues worked as is and which cues need some tweaking in the context of our production. I’m happy to report that I’m performing dang near all of these Lux cues! It creates such a different, deep and interesting tone as a thread throughout the play. A lot of them were truncated or modified to fit the flow of our staging, since the play moves a little faster than the 1947 radio version. In our show, it’s more helpful for the music to get in and get out during some of these moments, rather than to underscore completely.
The Lux score makes great use of both a Bø7 (B half-diminished 7 chord, aka B diminished triad with a minor 7th on top) and also the A+ (A augmented chord) which utilizes the Whole Tone scale starting on A in this case. Those two colors, the diminished scale and augmented whole-tone scale, which are very idiomatic to orchestral writing in the 1940’s for both the concert stage and radio drama productions, appear not only in moments of drama, as tremolo or oscillating between pairs of tritones moving in series of whole tones, but also as the color of the heavenly world (Clarence and Joseph) coming down to earth to observe and then interact with George Bailey throughout the play.
In addition to these Lux Radio cues being orchestrated for solo cello, I decided to dust off and old friend an pull it out of retirement: my trusty old 12 string guitar!! Now this guitar hasn’t seen a stage in about 20 years! Can you believe that! It’s been so so so much fun to reconnect with this past part of myself. I don’t think I’ve performed on guitar in about 15 years, and I don’t think I ever expected to perform on guitar again for the rest of my life… but I forgot how much I love the sound and feeling of the 12 string and am happy to pull it back in to the instrument rotation!
The reason I chose the 12 string guitar is very special to me, as it re-connects me to my roots. I wanted to capture the small town Americana feeling of Bedford Falls through Folk Music. Now originally, I was hunting for a mandocello (cello version of mandolin). I’ve wanted one forever, but they unfortunately are very rare to find these days. But when visiting my parents this fall, I looked over at the 12 string case and went, “Hey – wait a minute, the 12 string guitar is essentially a mandocello on bottom (octave doubled strings) and a mandolin on top (unison doubled strings)! ” And there you have it! I busted out the 12 string, reconnected with an old friend and here we are on stage together at long last!
I grew up in between 3 small towns: North Prairie, Eagle, & Mukwonago Wisconsin. We went to church in the smallest of those three towns, at the Methodist church in North Prairie. Now this church was about the best case scenario I could have asked for. It was small – anywhere from 35 to 100 parishioners on any given Sunday – and everyone knew everyone. You really felt the strong sense of community. We’d all catch up over coffee cake after service, and people would really check in with one another, and help one another out. There was a very active youth group volunteer community service component to the church, which my mom, Bea, was a central part of organizing (shout out to mom!!). So we had a strong community within the church and we were very active being of service in the community outside of the church too.
There was A LOT of music in our small church, specifically Folk music. Of course we had the classic church choir, which my father sang in, but we also had a folk quartet called Acoustic Grace who would sing a few songs each week. It was a couples duo where the wives sang and the husbands played guitar and sang. One of the musicians in that group, Tom Piper, was an excellent 12-string guitarist that I looked up to (he was also the father of some neighborhood best friends AJ and I had growing up). I always had that wonderful association with the fullness of 12-string guitar in that smaller quartet configuration, set in the comfort and warmth of that small church. So I grew up hearing 12 string guitar every week at my church via Acoustic Grace, but they weren’t the only folk group that played at our church! There was an all female acapella trio called Vita Voce who also sang regularly, and boy were they good too! Occasionally their husbands would accompany in folk flavor on guitar, but usually it was acapella. In addition to the Choir, Acoustic Grace, Vita Voce, and our Organist – we also had a Youth Band!
In fact, I learned Bass Guitar in church from our pastor Ron Krall! He had started a youth band, and said, “hey, I know you play cello and guitar, well bass guitar is basically those two instruments smushed together” (paraphrasing here). So one day after Sunday service, I stuck around, he handed me his acoustic-electric bass, showed me what the strings were and how to tune it. Then he set a boombox down on the table, popped in a cassette tape, and said, “now let’s learn a song by ear”. He hit play and the sounds of Jack Bruce’s bass lines pumped out. It was “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream, the famous 1960s rock trio featuring Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker. Well, he helped me to figure out the tune by ear until I had it down, sent me home with the bass guitar, and then the next week we played that tune at the Easter Service!! Pastor Ron had changed all the lyrics to fit the theme of his service, “In the Sunshine of God’s Love”. How cool is that!! He totally roped me in with music that I already loved, did something totally rad by having us play that song in church (as my first bass guitar performance) – and I was hooked. So nearly every Sunday, I was either playing bass guitar for our large youth band or doing a few tunes with Ron and members of Acoustic Grace (or both). Ron really facilitated fun as a group through music for the youth in that church, it was a very special time. Ron would even sing some solo songs with his guitar, there was just so much Folk music going on; that’s really one of the ways I learned music by ear and cut my teeth as a bass player. I learned an incredible amount, had a blast, and am now so grateful that pastor Ron and all of the other musicians at the church wanted to get the youth involved. I also had many opportunities to play as a ‘cello soloist’ accompanying the choir alongside piano, and those are also cherished memories for me too.
The folk music and small town Americana vibe in this show is a love letter to that small church community I had growing up in North Prairie. ❤️
I pulled from my upbringing of playing folk music in church and brought that experience to “It’s A Wonderful Life: A Radio Play” for any of the moments where the Cast is singing a song on stage. One of the other special aspects of Folk Music and my family tradition that I’m bringing to this production is that many Christmas celebrations involved AJ on guitar and myself on cello (and now Anne on viola!) sight reading Christmas tunes from my Grandfather’s “Easy-Play Speed Music” Christmas Carols book (for all organs, pianos, guitars)!! This music book was always lying around near his organ at my Grandma Nerren’s house in Chicago. So AJ and I would randomly flip through it and start playing one of the very-easy-to-sight-read tunes while our family was relaxing during the holiday and at times singing along. I can’t think of anything more folk-music-christmas than that! For this production at TAP, all of the songs we are singing as a group and any of the Christmas tunes I’m playing on cello or guitar were prepared directly from my Grandpa’s easy-play Christmas book :-). This is another way in which I’m dedicating this performance to my family. ❤️
Wow.. you made it this far. Well, here are some fun Instagram posts and Zelda photos as a reward!
Look out below! A rare 12 string sighting >>
It’s Zelda’s 1st time up in Sturgeon Bay, and she got to be a #TechDog!!!
Needless to say she’s made herself quite at home in the lovely TAP apartments! hahah
