Skip to main content

It's A Wonderful Life 

Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Three stars
The programme for Pitlochry's latest festive outing may claim Thomas M. 
Sharkey's stage adaptation of Frank Capra's seminal 1946 film inspired 
by Philip Van Doren Stern's short story, The Greatest Gift of All, to 
be 'A New Musical!', but the show is actually some twenty years old. 
While there may be good reasons why it's taken so long for Sharkey's 
take on things to receive its Scottish premiere, after last year's 
success with White Christmas, it is nevertheless a bold move for 
director John Durnin to programme something so rarely seen onstage, 
however iconic its source.

Much of the story remains unchanged, as small-town everyman George 
Bailey attempts to throw himself off a bridge before an angel called 
Clarence steps in with what these days would be deemed an intervention. 
The first half has Clarence watch over George as a celestial narrator 
to see how he got to such a state, while in the second, Clarence shows 
George how the picket-fence town of Bedford Falls would have descended 
into a fleshpot akin to Twin Peaks without him.

In what is effectively an American take on Charles Dickens' A Christmas 
Carol for the post Wall Street Crash era, such cosmological shifts are 
as serious as anything by Arthur Miller, feelgood ending 
notwithstanding. While played brightly enough by a cast led by John 
Jack as George and Robin Harvey Edwards as Clarence, stylistically 
things fall between two stools. In tone and aesthetic it feels like a 
fringe show, yet has clear aspirations to be a far bigger 
Broadway-bound affair, which Sharkey's pleasantly delivered if 
unremarkably generic musical numbers simply aren't up to. An 
intriguingly flawed curio.


The Herald, December 6th 2013

ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more