“Once in a blue moon, there comes a time where everything falls into place, and more importantly, when your head and heart are also in the right mindset. That’s when the opera becomes cathartic, life-changing experience. That was exactly what happened to me when I saw It’s a Wonderful Life. Right when I least expected it, the opera hit me like a ton of bricks and left such a deep mental and emotional impression in me. On a whole, the opera was a faithful adaptation of the movie; many of the scenes lifted directly from the movie. As Scheer mentioned, his approach is ‘not to improve on the source, but rather to illuminate the material from a new angle, to enable us to experience the characters and themes deeply and differently, to love them again as if for the first time.’ The pièce de résistance was the world where George Bailey had never been born. Scheer described it best with his quote: ‘And to us, a world without a George Bailey in it is a world without a soul, a world without … music. To rediscover our world, to live again, George must find his voice and sing himself back into existence.’ That was a pure stroke of genius, leaving the audience with a void and uneasy feeling as if we all were part of the dark world without George.”