It’s a Wonderful Life, here in Summerland — Another in our “Life in our little town” series

AKA 100+ years of community theatre and still going strong in Summerland

Riding home from play rehearsal the other night I offered our director a modest suggestion. You see, I am providing incidental music for a production of the supernatural, holiday classic “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Our show opens Friday December 1 and continues Dec 2, 3, and 8, 9, and 10. Buy your tickets here now.

We begin with the script familiar to many through the 1946 movie starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, directed by Frank Capra. We change things up however, as what the audience will actually see is a radio production at a fictional New York station, a production akin to those radio plays produced through the 1950s to the 1980s throughout North America. (I remember hearing many of these during the last half-hour of Peter Gzowski’s Morningside on CBC Radio.) Theatre-goers will watch live actors re-creating for radio listeners an audio track, with performers each portraying multiple characters, supported by live sound effects, and for my part, incidental music including advertising jingles. Same content—different presentation.

So what, you may wonder, did I suggest to my skeptical director? I suggested that we substitute Summerland BC for Bedford Falls, New York. “Easy peesy” I said. The transposition would be perfect. Small town, big ambitions. People are people, characters are characters, and in small towns everybody knows “who’s who” and “what they do”—including the miserable, avaricious Mr. Potter, the bad boy of all bankers.

And hey, there’s a love story, and what a love story it is, between the good hearted George who must play responsibility against dreams of greatness and adventure, and the beautiful and quintessentially post-war sweet Mary, unimaginable as a spinster.

At one point Mary asks George: “What’s your wish, George?”

Full of bravado, George replies: “Well, not just one wish. A whole hatful, Mary. I’m shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m going to see the world—Italy, Greece, the Parthenon, the Colosseum. Then I’m coming back here and go to college and see what they know . . . and then I’m going to build things: I’m gonna build air fields. I’m going to build skyscrapers a hundred stories high;  I’m gonna build bridges a mile long.”

Now I do not suggest that upon graduation all Summerland youth shout “let’s get out of the crummy little town” while parading down Main Street. Time was however that educational opportunities, access to trades apprenticeships, and economic possibilities were thin on the ground here. At one time, it was orchards or packing house work only. Options are more diverse now, but still, many want to see the world, and many do move out of the valley, sometimes permanently. A few return however as the allure of small town living exerts its influence.

And yes, while we don’t have the Bailey Brothers Savings and Loan, we do have a stand-alone, single branch credit union that continues to serve local customers, with leadership, past and present, who well understand small town dynamics and the benefits of a simpler lifestyle. A few families do own a majority of downtown property and businesses though thankfully, none exhibit Potter-ish behaviour. We have three drugstores no less, though none have added a soda fountain as Mr. Gower provided. We do have many “pretty girls” here (come see the show to see what I mean) and a few dreamy men.

Small towns such as Summerland and Bedford Falls allow us to look at ourselves, our relationships, our aspirations and ambitions, our errors and our successes. In Frank Capra’s re-working of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, with its use of past, present, and future life-tenses, we can re-imagine our community and our part in it. So we continue to defend our beloved Peach Orchard dog park; we wonder about the future of our tired old pool now that the borrowing referendum failed. We watch carefully how a hard-right politics influences not only the globe (Argentina, The Netherlands, Sweeden, and you-know-who in you-know-where), but also our country and to some extent here in the Okanagan valley.

In order to continue to search for good, for good people, for good acts of kindness, for goodness in our midst, I suggest the best way to do this is to buy tickets for our show.

And you may wonder, how director Linda reply to my question. Could we substitute Summerland for Bedford Falls? After a brief pause . . . she said NO.