Here’s a warm, vivid and imaginative presentation that’s a time machine back to simpler pleasures.

As part of the audience for a 1946 radio presentation of It’s A Wonderful Life, you enjoy the magic of radio drama. Five actors do double duty – as multivoiced interpreters for that imaginary radio audience out there, and as an ensemble of 5 radio pros working a script in front of you. Yes, they're holding scripts -- but under Lara Toner's direction they are moving and interpreting the story with the grace and timing of aerial artists.


It’s a fine holiday presentation – one that won’t scoff at the season, distort it with eccentric characters, or push any agenda other than the American Dream.

An avowal -- I’m as much a fool for old-fashioned Christmas stories as the next person. For example, I own four media versions of Dickens’ Christmas Carol – a film with George C. Scott as Scrooge, the 1940s black-and-white British version featuring Alastair Sim, and radio theatre versions with Lionel Barrymore and with Patrick Stewart.

Gorilla Man plays in a hang-loose theatre space Thursdays through Saturdays. The guys at the Creekside Lounge are more used to your typical 6th & 7th street music scene than to the romping of thespians, but they were good natured about hosting the show.

I arrived right at the posted time of 7:30 a.m., and I went directly into the bar. They directed me to the apparently unheated space next door, where some twenty folding chairs were set up in front of a bandstand. Director Susie Gidseg welcomed me aboard, and I joined the mostly college age crowd gathering there. The bartender eventually showed up and amicably sold me a Real Ale for just $2.50, so I was ready to go. I even took off my wool cap and later in the evening I unzipped my leather jacket.

The 3-person band led by Henna Chou showed up promptly, wearing white shirts, suspenders and fedoras, along with narrator Spencer Driggers. They launched into the impossibly nutty musical story of Billy, the 14-year-old boy who discovers that puberty for him means waking up with abundant fur growing on his hands and other parts of his body. “Mom! What’s going on??”

Gorilla Man is nothing more or less than an old-fashioned crowd-pleasing melodrama, descended directly from those 19th century populist shows in bars, halls and community centers in which traveling troupes presented stories of earnest heroes, young ladies in peril and impossibly wicked moustache-twirling villains.