It’s a Wonderful Life – a live radio play

By James Hanlon
Leader Staff Writer
Hee-Haw! Kick off the holiday season with a beloved Christmas classic, as a radio show. Oxford High School Theater will perform three showings of It’s a Wonderful Life: Radio Play this week at the performing arts center.
“The show is a live stage production set in a 1940’s broadcast studio (with a live audience),” the play’s director, OHS theater teach Krista Price explained. “The characters are radio voice actors who are acting out several characters from the story of It’s a Wonderful Life, and making all of their own live sound effects as well.”
All the props they use for sound effects are authentic to the time period, like old phones and belts. “We even use something as exotic as cornflakes to mimic footsteps, or we use water in a bucket to mimic when Harry falls through the ice in the beginning,” said Callum Gross, the 12th grader who plays the voice of George Bailey.
It’s a small cast, with members playing multiple characters. “There are different aspects that are accentuated with a radio play,” Gross said of the show’s format. “Lines, or your voice, matter a lot more – it carries a lot more. And I think creativity is really important in a play like this.”
Show times are Nov. 11 and 12 at 7 p.m. and a matinee Saturday, Nov. 13 at 2 p.m. Tickets can be purchased online, through a link at oxfordhighschooltheatre.com or at the door before the show. Oxford students in any grade K-12 get in free.