This week, I had the privilege of attending Saginaw Valley State University’s production of the It’s a Wonderful Life Christmas radio show. This is a very interesting form to present a play in. Instead of having the cast come onstage as the characters from It’s a Wonderful Life and perform the show like a regular play, this play had the cast come on and act like actors in a 1940’s radio studio. The actors were dressed in stereotypical 1940’s clothing instead of clothing from the play. The set was designed to look like a radio studio instead of the locations where the play took place.
The actors also behaved differently than you would expect them to. They milled around onstage and acted as if they were from the 1940’s, complete with the women over exaggerating chewing their gum. When the show began, they involved the audience by flashing an applause sign to signal appropriate places for us to clap. Each actor had a binder with a script and read their lines into microphones at the front of the stage. This was very interesting to watch because even though they had the script, they didn’t just read. They brought the characters to life by acting out movements to make their performance sound authentic.
One of the coolest things about the play, however, was the sound Foley. These two actors stood in a booth on the side of the stage. They had no speaking lines, but they provided sound effects for the show. They clinked glasses together for party or bar scenes and shook a piece of sheet metal to create the sound of magic. It was a very interesting process to see. Another added piece of comedy to the show was that it was interrupted for commercials of products ranging from Coke to Jell-O.
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