Photos Courtesy the Winter Park Playhouse
Spinal Tap reunited this year, so why not the Honky Tonk Angels? That’s the ad hoc country combo that audiences first met in 2018, when Roy Alan, artistic director of The Winter Park Playhouse, shepherded playwright Ted Swindley’s story of women who meet on a Greyhound bus and impulsively decide to form their own singing group.
Now they’re back in Honky Tonk Angels Holiday Hoedown, a seasonally themed sequel that finds our hillbilly heroines getting the band back together for a year-end gig at their favorite nightclub in Nashville.
The musical’s regional premiere promises a similar mixture of laughs, poignancy and melody. And the music—which runs the gamut from Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” to a Motown holiday medley to such novelty tunes as “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”—isn’t just country.
In the director’s chair this time will be Kate Adams Kramer, who also choreographed the show, while the musical director will again be Christopher Leavy. The Angels will be portrayed by Rebecca Jo Lightfoot, Tesia Kwarteng, Hannah McGinley Lemasters and Monica Titus.
Wait, you say, that’s a quartet, not a trio! True, but there’s an explanation. In the new show, the titular group has added a member since one of the characters is now pregnant and needs a backup in case she suddenly goes into labor.
Titus is the only cast holdover from the 2018 original, which also featured Heather Alexander, cofounder and executive director of the Playhouse. (Matthew J. Palm of the Orlando Sentinel called that production “a down-home treat for country-music fans.”)
This time around, though, Alexander is too busy with administrative affairs: The Playhouse’s longtime home in Winter Park is being renovated and expanded, which is why the 2025–26 season is being presented in the Mandrell—er, we mean the Mandell—Theater at Orlando Shakes. The upgraded Orange Avenue location will reopen in August 2026.
Orlando Shakes is located at 812 Rollins Street, Orlando, in Loch Haven Cultural Park. For more information, call or visit the website.
