STAGE REVIEW : Mood Is Right for Musical ‘Wonderful Life’

LAGUNA BEACH —  In hindsight it seems inevitable.

Someone was bound to think of taking Frank Capra’s warm and wonderful holiday movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and make a warm and wonderful Christmas musical out of it. That the “someone” turned out to be Sheldon Harnick of “Fiddler on the Roof” and “She Loves Me” is the pleasant surprise. His composer for this new production, now at the Laguna Playhouse, is the late Joe Raposo, best known for his musical contributions to “Sesame Street.”

It all fits. What Harnick and Raposo have wrought and renamed “A Wonderful Life,” is a traditional book musical filled with potential that, at the moment, is roughly semi-wonderful.

The operative word in Douglas Rowe’s affectionate and enthusiastic staging is roughly. “A Wonderful Life” is a work-in-progress. The first act is mostly work and the second all progress. Snipping and splicing should be done (the three-hour show should lose at least half an hour), but the signposts point to something worth doing.

Its mood is right. The puckish, energetic Ralph Bruneau is ideal casting in the James Stewart role. The name is only slightly changed here (from George to Frank Bailey), but the character is still that of the idealistic Building and Loan Everyman who almost goes under in his efforts to help his neighbors secure a piece of Bedford Falls, U.S.A. (Who would have thought in 1980, when Harnick and Raposo began tinkering with this idea, that it would become so timely in the wake of the recent savings and loan debacles?)

Bailey, as in the movie, is shown the wonder of his ways by his not-too-swift guardian angel, Clarence (the delightfully klutzy Harper Roisman).

Every Christmas story needs its Scrooge, and Nils Anderson, playing the mean banker, delivers one here who never backs off from his villainy, yet never overstates it.

There is an “Our Town” simplicity in the retelling of this grass-roots American story, and Harnick and Raposo have not minimized its darker aspects. But the first act noodles around in too much exposition, highlighted by the title song (“A Wonderful Life”) with its attractive Charleston sequence, touches of humor (Clarence’s funny-baleful “Wings”) and tender duets between Frank and his adoring girlfriend/wife Kathy (Valerie Perri, delightfully Donna Reed-ish, but no wimp).

The songs in this act are solid but haphazardly mapped. Something like “Show Me a Suitcase,” Frank’s chronicle of his dreams of travel, is useful as background but gets in the way of a yarn that needs to get off the ground faster.

By Act II, propulsion has been established and the songs have a lovely way of tumbling naturally together, like soft snow, mounting steadily to the show’s joyful conclusion. Its final scene is quintessentially Christmasy, with a Christmas tree worthy of the closing moments of “Annie,” but with a far more affecting story behind it.

Even in Act II, adjustments are needed. Frank’s attempted suicide is a bit clumsy. The “Unborn Sequence,” in which Frank visits a Bedford Falls that is very different without him, feels derivative and out of key in its overemphasis of the cheap and tawdry. This is, after all, not Brecht-Weill.

The “Blessing of the House” and “Linguine” numbers are good comic relief that need a sharper interpretation. Eric Hansen, Steve Glaudini and Randall Dodge give their all, but it wants crispness.

On the other hand, Anderson’s “First Class All the Way” is crisp as toast. And the recurrent intertwining of the hometown parade of “Welcome a Hero” with the developing catastrophes in Frank Bailey’s life is a device that works.

Harnick hits the top with a bitter song called “Precious Little.” Through it, in a beautiful bit of linguistic calisthenics, Frank contemplates the mess he believes he’s made of his life, as he tells his young daughter a bedtime story.

The production sits on a fairly impersonal multipurpose set of street lamps and painted trees, credited to Proscenery. Jeff Calderon’s lighting scheme is needlessly moody and perverse.

Karen Weller’s costumes, however, are nicely of a piece and director Rowe moves the show along swiftly enough 80% of the time. The rest of the time, it huffs under the pull of its own length. But there is heart and muscle here. Given another round of trims and refinements, this could be the start of something annual--traditional without being quaint or sentimental, and American to its root.

At 606 Laguna Canyon Road , Laguna Beach, Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:30. Until Dec . 17. Tickets: $15 to $17; (714) 494-8021).