The Wimberley Players hit one out of the park with their Hill Country Home Companion radio program presented on New Years Eve Eve. Modeled after the long-running Prairie Home Companion of National Public Radio fame, the show concept came from Don Minnick and was written by him and the creative team of David Bisett, Mike Cox, Karin and Steve Cunningham, Rodger Marion and Monica Michell.
The show opened on the WP stage to Sarah Jarosz’s song, “Hometown,” followed by the narrator’s description of Wimberley as “the place where the roads are crooked, the dirt a quarter inch deep, and the town square is anything but square.”
A jingle from one of the show’s sponsors, Uncle Steve’s Goat Milk Soap, followed, slyly extolling its product’s virtues and ending with a final bit of advice, “just add a wick and it’s a candle.”
With that, the audience knew they were in for a riotous, left-handed tribute to the Wimberley they knew and loved.
David Bisett as narrator introduced Jill Jones, Wimberley’s own yodeling singer-songwriter, who appeared on the original A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor. In 1994, she won the Western Music Association’s Grand National Yodeling Championship and the 1998 Academy of Western Artists Yodeling Award.
After a fresh tongue-in-cheek message from sponsor, “The Non-Profit Committee to Explore the Need for Committees,” the audience was in for an episode of Guy Noir Jr., Private Eye.
In this episode, a hapless, slow-onthe- uptick private eye was in deep water with a leggy new client. Foley artist Reji Smith gave us the perfect noir soundscape as Guy muddled through his client’s story of ex-husbands who all met an early demise.
While Guy Noir Jr. looked for his escape hatch, the audience fell into the smooth sounds of the Jazz Messenger Boys trio, whose music meshed to perfection with the HCHC production.
In Act II, Bisett, in shaky falsetto as Marcia Lee Markle, slew the audience with her appeal to support the Wimberley Newcomers Shut the Gate Guild.
One of the best bits of the evening proved to be “The Break-up Call” in which Mother Earth, played by Roxanne Strobel, gives the year 2023, played by Danny Moser, the final heave ho. His protests fell on deaf ears as she trotted out his failings, the most egregious of which was the worst drought in ages and a vile, scorching summer.
After more of the Jazz Messenger Boys and a game show involving the audience, Jill Jones and her band, Three Hands High, struck up a tune, and played “their losing song” for a competition they didn’t win.
The show ended with “The News from Here” in which the pastor of a local congregation admitted that each year the sermons were getting louder and the pews emptier.
Following energetic applause, whistles, and an exuberant curtain call, the audience emptied into the lobby to celebrate the dawning year with plentiful food, libations, and high spirits. As the first original production by the Wimberley Players in 44 years, the Hill Country Home Companion is perhaps more than a little overdue. Heard repeatedly was the question, “Will this be an annual event?” to which its creators carefully answered, “Maybe so.”
