Arts Alive! podcast: ‘It’s a Wonderful Life – A Live Radio Play’

Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life has got, as they say in the motion picture business, legs. Although the warm ‘n’ fuzzy Christmas season movie was not a critical or commercial success upon first release in 1947, repeated showings on television over subsequent decades caused it to grow, and grow, and grow on American audiences, who basked in its small-town charm, humor and easygoing morality.

Its story of one man’s eventual understanding that he is loved, more loved than he’s ever realized, has resonated through subsequent generations.

“It’s a Wonderful Life – A Live Radio Play.” Image: Stage Photography of Tampa.

Such a key strand in in the fabric of Americana was bound to spawn imitators, tributes and adaptations. Among the latter is Joe Landry’s long-running It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, a Tampa Repertory Theatre production of which is starting a three-weekend run tonight in the Shimberg Playhouse, inside the Straz Center for the Performing Arts complex.

Today’s guests on Arts Alive! are both longtime local practitioners of the theatrical arts – Colleen Cherry (director) and Jeremy Douglass (foley artist – the live, onstage sound effects creator).

For It’s a Wonderful Life – A Live Radio Play, Cherry and Douglass, both of whom are musicians, co-wrote the Tampa Bay-centric jingles the audience will hear in this specialized “live to radio” take on the Capra-corn classic.

Come with us now to Bedford Falls … click on the arrow to listen to the interview.