It’s time for something different.
After several years of performing “A Christmas Carol” or “It’s a Wonderful Life” radio plays, Limelight Theatre Company will premiere a brand new holiday radio show.
“This year we are doing an original script,” Director and Playwright Dylan Simons said. “This is the first year that we’re doing one that is completely original.”
Limelight will perform the “Vintage Variety Radio Hour Holiday Spectacular” at 7 p.m. Dec. 16-17 at the Little White School Museum in Oswego.
“It’s a tribute to old Christmas holiday specials,” Simons said. “Writing it I mostly had in mind TV specials from the ’50s and ’60s where you had like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly … they were wholesome and nice and they had familiar celebrity faces.
“It’s definitely more if a straight comedy than we’ve done in previous years for our Christmas show,” he said.
Owned and operated by Oswegoland Park District, Limelight Theatre Company began performing a script version of Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” in 2005.
“And we did that for a number of years. People came to expect it if us, and we loved doing it as a tradition,” Simons said. “But in, I believe it was 2013, we wanted to shake it up a bit and did an original adaptation of ‘A Christmas Carol.’ We set it in 1929 right after the stock market crash.”
For several years the theater company alternated between the two Christmas classics. But this year the group wanted to do something different.
“This is our attempt to try another out another thing we can do for this Christmas slot,” Simons said.
The premise of the new show, he said, “gets a bit meta.” It centers on a group of people at a larger radio station tasked with performing the annual radio show and the audience gets to watch as they put the show on.
“It’s a Chicago radio station that’s doing an annual show that was basically going for 45 years. At one point it was kind of one of these classic tribute specials that this station has kept going on to keep the tradition of it alive,” Simons said.
“The scenes, many of them are vignettes of what the performance is going to be. So these holiday sketches and songs kind of make up what the performance is going to be.
“But then you’ve got stuff that’s kind of going wrong because it’s the final dress rehearsal,” he said. “Everybody’s trying to scramble to make sure it all goes OK.”
All of the classic elements of an old radio show are there, from the actors reading from the script to the “in studio” produced sound effects.
“It’s a whole bunch of things that have to come together just right, and it’s very fun when they do,” Simons said of sound effects. “We’ve got kind of the classics. If we need hoofs we’ve got cups on gravel.
“But some of them have to get kind of inventive with squeaky hinges and other things,” he said. “That’s one of my favorites. There’s a squeaky hinge we have that when you move it back and forth just right, it sounds like a rat making rat noises. So we do weird stuff like that.”
Limelight tries to fit in as many elements of a classic radio show as possible, he said.
Costumes and lighting is also used since it’s performed live in front of an audience at the Little White School Museum. Built in 1850 as a church, it was later used as a school until the end of the 1960s.
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“It really lends itself to the old radio show genre,” Simons said. “It’s a nice relic.”
The cast comes from Oswego and the surrounding areas. Simons grew up in Montgomery and first joined Limelight Theatre Company around 2012 for a production of “Macbeth” and found a theater home.
“This has to become part of my life now,” said Simons, who now lives in DeKalb. “So I stuck around long enough, started directing shows a handful of summers ago.”
Writing the “Vintage Variety Radio Hour Holiday Spectacular” was fun, he said, but also “a little tricky.”
“Because (when) you think Christmas, it’s huge,” said Simons, who teaches writing and film at college of DuPage in Glen Ellyn and Kishwaukee College in Malta. “There’s so much Christmas music, so many Christmas movies, there’s so much you can work with. And that is true. But is a very specific genre, the Christmas play.”
Tickets for the “Vintage Variety Radio Hour Holiday Spectacular” can be purchased online and, if available, at the door.
“Right now we just got these two performances so if we sell a lot of tickets for these it is possible these will fill up,” Simons said. “Not a bad idea to buy them in advance but we will be selling them at the door to the extent that we can.”
‘Vintage Variety Radio Hour Holiday Spectacular’
When: 7 p.m. Dec. 16-17
Where: Little White School Museum, 72 Polk St., Oswego
Tickets: $8-$10 adults, $6-$8 students/seniors
Information: 630-554-1010; limelighttheatrecompany.org/
Kathy Cichon is a freelance reporter for the Beacon-News.