Take a holiday classic loved by all, add a few star turns and more
than a whiff of camp, don your gay apparel and get set to make some
memories: That is the aim of It’s a Fabulous Life!, David
Sexton and Albert Evans’s loose and merry musical adaptation of Frank
Capra’s bittersweet It’s A Wonderful Life. It’ s a madcap
pageant, and it works.

It is also, for all its excellent beefcake and over-the-top
hilarity, improbably moving. Here is a new musical about real family
values — everyone’s families, not just those of straight Republicans.
Here also is a celebration of our taking care of each other, loving
each other, loving life. While Capra’s picture presented us with a man
on the verge of suicide who by the end is made to see how much his
life means to everyone around him, Sexton’s play goes one sweeter with
a gay hero so depressed at Christmastime that he wishes he had never
been born gay. With the help of an angel, he gets his wish. But, by
the close of Act Two, he comes to accept himself and his world in a
spirit of generosity and warmth that drenches the whole affair and
sends audiences home with a smile.

The piece began life as an extended skit for the South Beach Gay
Men’s Chorus, grew into an ambitious musical last season in Coral
Gables, and has now been spruced up with intelligent direction by
Robert Johanson, outrageous costumes by Estella Vroncovich, and
delicious leading performances by E. L. Losada, Kenny Calabria,
Ezequiel Hernandez, Andy Rogow and David Leddick. The songs are
catchy, clever and fun. It is at the newly spiffied Byron Carlyle
Theater in Miami Beach, then next week it moves to the Amaturo Theater
of the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale. It
should have a long life beyond that, frankly: with just a little
editing and a tad more polish, It’s A Fabulous Life! could
become a gay Christmas classic.

As it is, the play’s improbable mix of old Hollywood and queer
avant-garde, of retro charm and postmod irony, even of both good and
appalling acting, has a way of falling into place miraculously by the
end. Of course today’s South Beach is a long way from Capra’s Bedford
Falls in 1946. And while the stress of the holidays may be quite
enough to give anyone vulnerable the blues, the gay hero of It’s A
Fabulous Life! is facing troubles Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey
never dreamed of in It’s A Wonderful Life: Four more years of
Dubya, for starters, with fundamentalist bigots on the rise, yahoos
baying for blood in the halls of Congress and right-wing ayatollahs
ready to pounce and crush any semblance of diversity, tolerance and
hope. Add to that the everyday quirks of life that our Everyman must
face, plus a heavy dose of backstage intrigues and some desperate
drama queens, and the holidays ahead seem bleak indeed. Yet, against
all odds and just like Capra’s picture, Sexton’s play is very much
about hope. It is a life-affirming, mood-brightening,
in-your-face-liberal and, yes, pretty fabulous affair. That it happens
to be very entertaining makes it a fabulous Christmas gift.

Losada plays Joe, a young playwright whose work includes such gems
as the gay Restoration comedy She Shtoops to Conquer as well as
his current musical project, Randolph the Rainbow Reindeer. His
family seems not to have come to terms with his being gay and have
told him not to come home for Christmas. His hot boyfriend Luis,
played by Ezequiel Hernandez, doesn’t quite understand him. Rehearsals
for his play are not going well, what with an opening in days and an
amateur cast in revolt. By the time an angel named Arthur answers his
prayer and makes him straight, one can almost sympathize with Joe’s
plight.

True, the piece is not perfect. Act One especially still wants
tightening: It takes too long to get to the parallels with the movie’s
premise, and all the subplots about the Randolph the Rainbow
Reindeer cast could be resolved with an editor’s blue pencil.
Still, the songs are always catchy and often stirring. The script is
peppered — even overspiced — with show-biz references to everything
from 42nd Street and Gypsy to Mommy Dearest and
Sunset Boulevard as well as to the venerable Capra picture. But
it is also written from the heart. The camp humor gets the camp
treatment, but there is real pathos when the script hits home. Losada
and Hernandez make the most of Joe and Luis’s relationship, musically
and dramatically. Andy Rogow is genuinely touching as the older stage
director. Perhaps sweetest of all is the surprise of Calabria, best
known locally as the drag television personality Daisy Deadpetals, as
both Carlo and Miss Carlotta. With the assurance of a young Charles
Busch, and looking not a little like Christina Applegate on a very
good day, Calabria touches the heart in his patter, soars with the
cast through the rousing Act Two showstopper "It’s A Fabulous
Christmas" and sets up the emotional tsunami of the finale, "God Bless
the Road Less Traveled." In moments like that, It’s A Fabulous
Life! becomes as timeless as It’s a Wonderful Life. And
it’s a lot funnier.