Bringing A Christmas Classic To Wonderful Life — On Stage

Christmas is coming, and soon TV screens everywhere will light up with that 1946 holiday classic, It's a Wonderful Life. But the same story is coming a little early to the stage of the Houston Grand Opera. That's right: An operatic version of George Bailey's struggle with life and death opens this Friday.Librettist Gene Scheer admits that adapting such a beloved movie has sometimes felt like a fool's errand. "It's almost secular scripture, this piece," he says. "Everyone knows all the lines."In the film and the opera, the story is the same. Both look at the life of George Bailey of Bedford Falls: his dreams, his love, his crushing disappointments which bring him to the brink of suicide. "In the end, it's really such an operatic story," Scheer says.Composer Jake Heggie says they had to put the iconic Frank Capra film as far behind them as they could. "You internalize the material: You love it, you memorize it, and then you forget about the original source," he says. The goal, he says,