{"id":66175,"date":"2020-12-23T02:30:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-23T11:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/review-viewers-can-have-a-wonderful-christmas-time-at-home\/"},"modified":"2020-12-23T02:30:00","modified_gmt":"2020-12-23T11:30:00","slug":"review-viewers-can-have-a-wonderful-christmas-time-at-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/review-viewers-can-have-a-wonderful-christmas-time-at-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Viewers can have a ‘Wonderful’ Christmas time at home"},"content":{"rendered":"

You don’t have to be a fan of “It’s A Wonderful Life” to enjoy Perseverance Theatre’s digital production of “This<\/a> Wonderful Life.” <\/a><\/p>\n

I know this firsthand because I’ve never especially loved the holiday classic — for a point of reference “Gremlins” and “Tangerine” are my two favorite Christmas movies —but found plenty to like in the show by Steve Murray.<\/p>\n

“This Wonderful Life,” which is available to stream through Christmas Day, is the rare effort that successfully attempts to have its cake and eat it, too. It’s both a somewhat reverent one-actor adaptation of the Frank Capra seasonal staple and a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the show.<\/p>\n

Rather than undercutting the treacly plot, pithy asides and narration delivered by Wesley Mann, who also portrays the characters and actions he’s commenting on, help ground a story that hinges in large part on a wing-seeking guardian angel. Plus, it makes some of the movie’s subtext into plain old text.<\/p>\n

[Perseverance Theatre’s latest should ring a bell<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\n

At one memorable point, Mann notes how much of “It’s a Wonderful Life” is driven by money.<\/p>\n

“Discuss,” he instructs the audience in a fourth-wall-breaking bit that does prompt at least some thought about the intersection of commercialism, capitalistic predation and the holiday season.<\/p>\n

Mann, under the co-direction of Leslie Ishii, his wife and Perseverance Theatre’s artistic director, and Josh Lowman, who added some digital flourishes to the production, does an excellent job of selling the material.<\/p>\n

Most impressively — to me, at least — he walks the tight rope of a Jimmy Stewart impression while steering clear of plummeting into Don Knotts territory.<\/p>\n

The frenetic pace created by the one-man nature of the piece highlight elements of the plot that have led to “It’s A Wonderful Life’s” endurance while redeeming some elements of the movie that have seemed hoary and saccharine for decades.<\/p>\n

Hearing George Bailey’s plight laid out in plain narration underscores his dark Christmas Eve of the soul in a way that lends gravity to the character’s internal struggle. He’s the small-town, middle-aged man at the center of every essay about economic anxiety transposed 70 years into the past, and that’s made almost uncomfortably clear as each blow is dealt.<\/p>\n

Additionally, the vaudevillian energy required to fill roles occupied by dozens of actors in the film allows Mann to hang a lampshade on the creaky characterization of some of the central characters in “It’s A Wonderful Life.”<\/p>\n

When played with zeal and cartoonish energy by Mann, characters that are basically archetypes of a big bad and selfless punching bag make a lot more sense. The show even gets to call out the inexplicable number of “ethnic stereotypes” who reside in Bedford Falls in a way that allows a “that’s a spicy-ah meat ball” accent work to squeak by.<\/p>\n

I’m unsure how well the material would work for an audience that has never seen the original “It’s A Wonderful Life,” but “This Wonderful Life” can land with both folks who unironically love the old film and people who never quite cottoned to it.<\/p>\n

For the uninitiated, the two works would make a great double feature.<\/p>\n

• Contact Ben Hohenstatt at (907)308-4895 or bhohenstatt@juneauempire.com. Follow him on Twitter at @BenHohenstatt.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Perseverance production works whether you love the source material. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":474,"featured_media":66176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[73],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-66175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","tag-ccw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/474"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66175\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66175"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=66175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}