Upcoming: Night Watch by Lucille Fletcher, Wimberley Players, April 29 - May 22

Found on-line:

present

by Lucille Fletcher
directed by Nathan Villarreal
April 29 - May 22
Friday and Saturday evenings 8:00 p.m.
Sunday matinees 2:30 p.m.

A gripping mystery-thriller, we glimpse the life of Elaine Wheeler as she paces about inher luxurious Manhattanapartment near dawn, unable to sleep. While her husband is trying to calm her, she spots something through her window, inside an apartment in a building across the way, disturbing, distant, yet clearly visible to her – a tattered chair, shadows...

As seeming illusion melds with existing reality and her haunting memories, Elaine is slowly drawn into a fearsome web of intrigue and foreboding while confronted by family, friends, and the authorities—all who doubt her word. As the plot thickens, the atmosphere of menace and suspense builds to a chilling climax you won’t want to miss.

Tickets may be purchased online at any time.

Stop The World, I Want To Get Off, Wimberley Players, July 31 - August 23

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?

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .