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ACH TRANSFORMS
THE COASTER THEATRE IN CANNON BE
LIDAY SEASON
INTO BEDFORD FALLS THIS FESTIVE HO
Story by JON BRODERICK
Submitted photos by GEORGE VETTER / CANNON-BEACH.NET
t’s a holiday weekend in Cannon
Beach. Lights, shop windows, mean-
derers, a marquee, the box office, then
the theater doors and a crowd inside.
Guffman’s here. It’s a sold out show. It’s
a wonderful life.
Bob Cratchit and Ebenezer Scrooge,
though, are elsewhere at Christmas Eve
this season. The Coaster Theater has become
Bedford Falls.
“We’ve toyed with bringing ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’
to the Coaster for many years,” says Jenni Troni-
er, the Coaster Theatre’s marketing and operations
director. “Our review committee decided this year to
present an alternative to the Coaster’s traditional holi-
day Dickens play.”
“A Christmas Carol” will return to the Coaster
in 2017. In the meantime, important similarities
unite the two popular holiday plays: An angel leads
troubled men from the precipice of death, through the
consequences of their lives, from revelation to epiph-
any, just in time for them, with rekindled joyfulness,
to save themselves and others.
Of course, similarities between Ebenezer Scrooge
and George Bailey just about end there. George
Bailey, a restless, adventurous spirit who suddenly
inherits the weighty responsibilities of his family’s
business, Bailey Bros. Building and Loan, settles into
the long slog of small town life. The town quietly
and happily prospers. But George Bailey’s scroogey
business rival, Mr. Potter — who could use a visit by
an angel himself — lucks into an opportunity to ruin
Bailey and the Building and Loan. When the play
opens, despairing at the futility of his unremarkable
life, George Bailey is about to leap from a bridge.
Maybe his life insurance will save the family bank.
Maybe it would have been better if he’d never been
born.
The original film, 70 years old this season, is an
elaborate adaptation of a brief, unpublished holiday
story written a few years earlier by Philip Van Doren
Stern, an accomplished Civil War historian, editor
and novelist who was inspired by Dickens’ tale. He
printed 200 copies of his own story, “The Greatest
Gift,” and sent them as Christmas cards.
Hollywood, though, found the story. There it suf-
fered several failed attempts to turn it into a suitable
screenplay until director Frank Capra and his Liberty
Films production writers salvaged it and created “It’s
a Wonderful Life” starring Jimmy Stewart in 1946.
Continued on Pg. 11
George Bailey, played by Ben Ruderman, right, uses his honeymoon savings to lend financial support to townsfolk at the Building
and Loan during a run on the bank.
G
his w
George Bailey, played by Ben Ruderman, right, finds love with Mary Hatch, played by Emily Dante in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”