Good Heavens! : Can ‘Wonderful Life’ Earn Its Wings as a Musical?

Angels on roller skates, a giant halo hovering in space, a stage painted to look like the night sky. This may not be the way film director Frank Capra envisioned the heavens when he shot his 1946 masterpiece “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but it is the dominant look of “A Wonderful Life,” a musical based on the classic picture, which opens at Arena Stage tonight.

“A Wonderful Life,” which features book and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick (“Fiddler on the Roof”) and music by the late Joe Raposo (“Sesame Street”), is attracting enormous pre-opening attention. Thanks in part to the film’s status as a Christmastime TV perennial and director Capra’s death this year at the age of 94, Newsweek, National Public Radio, the Associated Press and other major media outlets are planning coverage of the production.

Arena Stage is no stranger to this kind of scrutiny--in its 40 years it has sent “The Great White Hope,” “Moonchildren,” “Indians” and other plays onto Broadway--but “A Wonderful Life” is something else again.

The film’s standing as an American classic--an archetypal tale of dreams, loss and the power of love--puts enormous pressure on the musical and its creative team. Will audiences come expecting to see a theatrical re-creation of Capra’s darkly sentimental vision? Will they accept 36-year-old, L.A.-based actor Casey Biggs in the James Stewart role of Everyman hero George Bailey? Will they take to the musical numbers and in-the-round staging?

“There’s no doubt that part of the audience’s mind will be remembering the film,” said Harnick, “but they will get involved with this man who doesn’t look like Jimmy Stewart. He’s going through a crisis in his life, and they will get involved with the character.”

If nothing else, the production will include a few radical departures from the Capra work. Although several minor characters in the film have been dropped for the stage version, “A Wonderful Life” adheres closely to the original plot--faced with the failure of his savings and loan, George Bailey contemplates suicide. But a guardian angel shows him that his hometown would have been a sadder place if he had never lived, and he returns home on Christmas Eve to discover that the townsfolk have rallied around him to save his bank.

In the Arena version, however, angels and heaven play a much bigger role--literally and figuratively--than in the film. The Capra classic leaves heaven to the imagination, and the only angel actually seen is Bailey’s guardian Clarence, played by impish character actor Henry Travers. On stage, the entire set--with its hovering halo and nighttime sky motif--is suggestive of celestial magnificence. The show opens with Bailey contemplating suicide, then segues to a scene in heaven, where head angel Joseph, not seen in the film, instructs Clarence regarding the problem with which he has to deal. Clarence is portrayed by Jeffrey V. Thompson, a 300-pound man, who gets to sing his own song, “Wings,” and joins a phalanx of roller-skated angels in an upbeat production number.

This staging is the culmination of nearly a decade spent tinkering with the material. Harnick first became interested in the property about 10 years ago, when a casting director suggested he explore the possibility of turning the film into a musical.

The lyricist wasn’t sure “It’s a Wonderful Life” would work in that context, but he was attracted to the film’s themes, and when he ran the movie for himself, “I saw it was so full of emotion, there seemed to be moments for songs.”

Harnick had recently ended his longtime partnership with composer Jerry Bock, with whom he had collaborated on “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Fiorello,” and other musicals. As he began working on “A Wonderful Life,” Harnick thought it would be a perfect fit for the skills of Raposo, whom Harnick first met in 1965 when Raposo was serving as a one-man pit orchestra for the Boston production of the Harnick-Bock musical “She Loves Me.” That friendship had evolved over the years into an on-again, off-again collaboration that included everything from TV sitcom theme songs to symphonic cantatas.

“I planned two set pieces for ‘A Wonderful Life’ that would almost be mini-operas,” said Harnick, “and I needed a man like Joe with great compositional skill, somebody who knew theater music and pop music.”

Harnick and Raposo began working seriously on the project in 1983. Harnick said it was tough going, especially when it came to compressing the enormous amount of exposition in the film into a viable theatrical form. “I was trying to compress it to make room for some song and dance without losing the emotional impact,” he said. “There’s a lot of information in the film, and I kept putting a lot of it in the first 20 minutes, so the show kept stopping dead for exposition.”

By 1984, “A Wonderful Life” was ready for a staged reading in New York. But the work still had a number of problems, particularly with its book. So over the course of the next six years, it bounced around from performance to workshop to rewrites as its creators tried to fine-tune the work (Raposo died in 1989).

The process included a four-week run at the Laguna Playhouse in 1989. Reviewing the production, The Times’ Sylvie Drake called it “. . . a traditional book musical filled with potential that, at the moment, is roughly semi-wonderful . . . ‘A Wonderful Life’ is a work-in-progress . . . but the signposts point to something worth doing.”

Arena Stage first heard of the show when Biggs, an Arena regular, mentioned it to Douglas Wager, who had staged several successful musical revivals for the theater. A producing associate then saw a staged reading last year at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse, and reported back that it was, said Wager, “a good compression of a fairly intricate movie.”

By this time Wager had been named artistic director of Arena Stage, and he was ready to commit to the project with himself as director. When AT&T; decided to co-sponsor “A Wonderful Life” as part of its “AT&T;: OnStage” program (which has also helped sponsor the Tony Award-winning version of “The Grapes of Wrath”), all the elements for a major regional production were in place.

And now, hovering in the background of the show is the eternal question: Is it headed for Broadway?

“Anything is possible,” said Wager, “but this was not cast or capitalized with Broadway in mind. If the show meets with approval here, the best we can hope for are some guardian angels out there who want to preserve the integrity of the piece, and enable it to have a commercial future.”

Added Harnick: “It’s a terrible climate for musicals. They cost so much money, and there’s a recession on, so people are reluctant to lay out the money. My hopes for this are modest. I hope we’ll be well-received in Washington, and that I won’t have too much more work to do on it.”