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 morality play. The white-face pantomime makeup appears to be a direct imitation of the visual stylings of French mime Marcel Marceau, who had become an international star in the decade preceding Stop The World. Littlechap and the rest of the cast use some amusing pantomime gestures, including a quirky little sequence of salutation, crossed-hands and quiver to suggest that randy Littlechap is successfully seducing a woman character.
Part of the joke is that this show is the opposite of a pantomime: it's a musical with both words and lyrics, featuring ballads that entered immediately into the canon of popular song. I never saw Stop The World, the unsuccessful 1966 film version of it, or the short-lived update and revival attempted in 1978 by Sammy Davis, Jr. But the 1960s were themed by Tony Bennett, Barbara Streisand, Sammy Davis, Jr. and others with recordings of Newley's Once In A Lifetime, Gonna Build A Mountain and, most memorably, What Kind of Fool Am I?
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