Reviews for Wimberley Players Performances
Review: She Loves Me by Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 27, 2011
Just as in the classic screwball comedies of the 1930's and 1940's, the background to the comic courtship is decorated with stock characters.
The Wimberley Players' production of She Loves Me directed by Dawn Youngs delivers a serene and intricately musical vision of a 1930s fairy tale. Preserved as if in one of those snow globes awaiting a gentle shake to send the flakes whirling, a perfume shop in Budapest is a holiday setting where affairs of the heart predominate. The elegant ladies of the city come seeking their creams, perfumes and philtres; the clerks of the shop, good earnest …
Review: Arsenic and Old Lace by Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 02, 2011
My favorite moment in the play came when the jig appeared to be up; Ben-Moshe stepped forward, extending his hands to be handcuffed and instead received a hearty handshake from the droll, diminutive Marvin Carson as the thick headed Lt. Rooney of the police.
Joseph Kesselring's 1941 play Arsenic and Old Lace is a "golden oldie" kept alive for American culture by Frank Capra's 1944 film with Cary Grant and by community theatre productions such as the charming one currently at the playhouse in Wimberley. Theatre critic Mortimer Brewster has been brought up his maiden aunts Abby and Martha, and one wonders how he escaped noticing the fact that they're nuttier than fruitcakes. Mortimer's brother Teddy stalks about the place, …
Review: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers by Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 30, 2010
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers has a simple message with an indulgent wink. Men are real men, except when they're really just boys; girls want to be won and whirled away.
The charming musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers now playing on weekends at the Wimberley Players' stage makes me think of the waggish definition of a "theatre classic": something that's really good but that no one does any more. Director Lee Colée Atnip has been working since February with members of this cast of 37, and that preparation pays off. Both the players and the members of the preview audience last week were having a tremendous …
Review: The 1940s Radio Hour by Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 01, 2010
The theatre audience becomes the studio audience, responding appropriately to the applause signs. They get involved in all those secondary stories and relationships unfolding behind the folks currently talking into the big old clunky microphones down front.
Can there by anyone who doesn't appreciate the warm sepia glow of old time radio broadcasts? Of course, many favorite films from the 1930s and 1940s provide a similar feeling of nostalgia, but their images make a different experience. An old-time radio broadcast was magic because it came right into your home and into your head. Millions of Americans shared the experience of being, literally, "the radio audience" -- from audire, Latin, "to listen." Those recordings and …
Review: Stop The World, I Want to Get Off by The Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 12, 2009
'Stop The World, I Want To Get Off' is a sprightly entertainment, but one with references and nuances that probably puzzled younger members of the cast at first. Those of us with a few wrinkles had the opportunity to smile.
Nathan Villareal's agile clowning and appealing tenor voice are at the heart of the Wimberley Players' production of Stop The World, I Want to Get Off, playing weekends through August 23. As Littlechap, the Everyman in this circus-themed musical entertainment, Villareal gives us a cocky Cockney social climber, resembling actor/pop singer Anthony Newley, who put the show together with composer Leslie Bricusse in 1961.The show is an interesting mix of genres, part cabaret and part medieval …
Review: Leading Ladies by The Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 24, 2009
Many shenanigans, an engagement party with some impressively comic tango-dancing, changes of character and costume, and the deceiver deceiv'd -- Ken Ludwig is no Shakespeare, but we don't need high culture to have a good time with this script.
Leading Ladies by Ken Ludwig has all the big-footed clowning of a British pantomime, that venerable, wheezy holiday art form in which the British public hoots and chortles at manly men dressing up as women. Dame Edna is the royalty of that genre, but every middle- and lower-class family wants to attend the local "panto" in December, and British TV comedy sketches will inevitably get around to putting a male comedian into something frilly, and preferably …