VISTA
If a pandemic hadn’t arrived earlier this year, Vista’s Moonlight Stage Productions had planned to produce Lance Arthur Smith’s “Miracle on 34th Street: A Musical Radio Play” onstage at the city’s Avo Playhouse this holiday season.
But when that became impossible, Moonlight officials considered filming the stage play instead and livestreaming it as a fundraiser for the Moonlight Cultural Foundation. Then Colleen Kollar Smith, who is Moonlight’s managing director, came up with the idea to return the story to its audio origins. Playwright Smith based his 2016 show on a real-life script from a 1947 Lux Radio Theater broadcast in New York City.