After a quiet eight months, the Winnipesaukee Playhouse’s campus sprung back into action on last week as the theatre company welcomed the technical team and actors who will be kicking off the 2021 season. And while the original 2020 season of shows was condensed into a small, three-show run last fall, the 2021 season has been expanded to encompass three plays and four musicals spanning from June through October.

The theme of this year, “Small and Beautiful,” represents the fact that each show will be on a smaller scale in terms of the numbers of people involved, but this newly expanded length for the professional season will allow for shows that take place both indoors and on the theatre’s new outdoor stage, through summer and early fall.

Producing Artistic Director, Neil Pankhurst, says, “we knew that reduced patron capacity meant shows would need to be leaner. In doing that, it allowed us to choose some really unique, exciting titles that we may not have attempted in earlier seasons where the costs involved relied on filling the entire house.”

One play that Pankhurst had been wanting to produce for many years, Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, fit that bill and will start the season on June 16. Pankhurst and the three actors in this drama, Krystal Pope, AJ Ditty, and Will Wilder, had their first read-through on Monday. For some of them, it was their first production since the beginning of the pandemic.

Betrayal will be followed by the Tony Award-winning mystery Sleuth which will be performed indoors from June 30 through July 17. The next show, a musical called Dani Girl, will be on the outdoor stage July 14 through July 31.

New Hampshire Theatre Award-winning actress Ashley Meeken, who was last seen on the Playhouse stage as Velma Kelly in Chicago in 2019, will next perform a relatively unknown Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Tell Me on a Sunday, on the indoor stage from July 28 through Aug. 14. This will be followed by the premiere of a play with music that the Playhouse commissioned for the 2020 season to celebrate the ratification of the 19th amendment. Then called Votes for Women, it has been retitled Hooligans and Convicts! and will have its world premiere from Aug. 18 through Sept. 4.

The final outdoor show of the season will also be a premiere, but the music will be very familiar as Pankhurst has written a script to accompany favorite songs from the Great American Songbook by composers such as George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. Called It Had to be You, this show will contain lots of singing and dancing and will perform from Sept. 1 through Sept. 18.

The professional season will wrap up from Sept. 22 through Oct. 9 with the comedy Glorious, The True Story of Florence Foster Jenkins: The Worst Singer in the World. It will feature Broadway veteran and New Hampshire Theatre Award-winning actress Carolyn Kirsch.

The Playhouse is focused on safety and has published a page of COVID-19 protocols on their website to prepare patrons for what to expect when they attend the theatre. Tickets for all productions can be purchased by calling the box office at (603) 279-0333.

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