"Theatre at its finest… Absurdly Enjoyable!" That's the New York Times, quoted on the Playhouse's own event listing for "The 39 Steps," the show that closes out the Winnipesaukee Playhouse's professional summer season this year. It's a good pull quote. It's also, in a small but telling way, describing a season that is already ending by the time most of Meredith settles back into its regular rhythm.
Because here's the part that doesn't show up on the marquee: when the professional company's last curtain falls on "The 39 Steps," the building at 33 Footlight Circle doesn't go quiet. It changes casts. The people who take the stage next aren't touring actors booked for a summer contract. They're the Winni Players, the theater's community company, and the shows they're mounting this fall are arguably a better read on what Meredith actually is than anything staged in July.
Two Theaters Under One Roof
The Winnipesaukee Playhouse is unusual in a way that's easy to miss if you only ever go in August. It runs a professional summer stock season and a full community theater season in the same building, under the same name, on the same stage, and by most accounts it's one of the only theaters in the country set up to do both. The professional side draws paid talent for a handful of shows each summer. The Winni Players side is cast from whoever in the Lakes Region shows up to audition.
The theater itself has a Meredith origin story worth knowing if you've never heard it. It started in 2004, founded by siblings Bryan Halperin and Lesley Pankhurst along with their spouses Johanna and Neil, in the Alpenrose Plaza in Weirs Beach, a former Dexter Shoes outlet space in Laconia. It moved to Meredith in 2013, onto the former Annalee Dolls factory campus on Route 3, a 14-acre property with seven buildings that got a roughly $4 million buildout to become what the theater calls a "Tanglewood type of setting." The new house seats a little over 200, more than double the 84 seats of the old Weirs Beach space. That's the building the town has now, and it's the same building that hosts both a summer stock company recruited from outside the area and a community company built almost entirely from people who live here.
What Actually Opens This Fall
The Winni Players' 2026 season, the one that runs after the professional company wraps, includes three productions worth knowing about if you live within driving distance of Meredith:
- The Great Winnipesaukee Steamboat Race and Musical Talent Contest — staged in collaboration with Mount Washington Cruises, this one is set aboard the M/S Mount Washington itself, which means the show isn't confined to the Footlight Circle stage at all.
- The Edgar Allan Poe Afterlife Radio Show — a community-cast production timed for the Halloween stretch of the calendar, continuing a Playhouse tradition of radio-drama style Poe adaptations in October.
- Irving Berlin's White Christmas — the holiday closer, running the Winni Players into the end of the year.
None of these are touring productions. They're cast, rehearsed, and performed by people who audition in Meredith, get cast in Meredith, and then go back to their day jobs in Meredith between rehearsals. The Playhouse's producing artistic director, Bryan Knowlton, wrote to this fall's auditionees after casting was posted, and the note is worth reading past the boilerplate:
"What struck me most wasn't just the talent in the room, but the kindness, enthusiasm, and sense of community that make the Winni Players such a special part of the Winnipesaukee Playhouse."
That's not marketing copy written for a program. It's a director talking to the people he just had to turn away from a cast list, and it's the kind of detail that tells you more about what this season actually is than a synopsis of "White Christmas" ever could.
The Names Paying For It
There's a second layer to this that's easy to miss unless you go looking for who sponsors what. The Playhouse's 2026 professional season carries one set of underwriters. The Community Theatre and Education Department season, the Winni Players' side of the calendar, is sponsored separately by Northeast Mill Services and Bank of New Hampshire. A crossover production staged with Laconia's Powerhouse Theatre Collaborative lists Grappone Automotive Group, LaValley's Building Supply, and Meredith Village Savings Bank among its backers.
None of those are national tourism sponsors chasing summer visitor dollars. They're the kind of businesses that sponsor a Little League team or a church supper, and they're underwriting the season that runs when Meredith's summer population has mostly gone home. The professional summer stock company pulls in vacationers looking for a night out on their way through the Lakes Region. The Winni Players season is the one the town is actually paying for.
Why the Off-Season Is the Real Season
It would be easy to read the fall Winni Players lineup as the "smaller" half of the Playhouse's year, the local theater filler between two proper professional runs. That's backwards. The professional season is built to be seen once, by people passing through. The community season is built to be seen by the same people twice, because half the audience knows someone in the cast.
A steamboat-race musical staged on an actual working steamship on Lake Winnipesaukee isn't the kind of show you get in most towns, and it isn't happening because a booking agent thought it would sell tickets to out-of-towners. It's happening because Mount Washington Cruises and the Winnipesaukee Playhouse are two Meredith-area institutions that decided to put on a show together, for an audience made up largely of neighbors. The Poe radio show that follows it in October isn't chasing Halloween tourism either. It's a tradition the Winni Players have kept alive for their own audience, year after year, regardless of who's visiting that week.
If you live in Meredith year-round, this is the stretch of the Playhouse calendar that was actually built with you in mind. The professional season is the postcard. The fall community season, cast from your neighbors and bankrolled by the businesses on Main Street, is the part of the theater that belongs to the town whether or not a single leaf-peeper ever buys a ticket.
Auditions for next year's Winni Players season and the education department's youth productions typically open in September, so if the idea of standing on that stage yourself has ever crossed your mind, this is roughly the time of year that door opens. Ticket and audition details for the current season are posted directly on the Winnipesaukee Playhouse's own site, and the venue's full history, including the 2013 move from Weirs Beach, is documented on its Wikipedia page if you want the longer version.
Meredith's summer gets the reviews. Its fall gets the neighbors who put the show on. That's worth knowing whether you've lived here for decades or you're still learning which season actually shows you the town.
If you're thinking about what it's like to plant roots in a place like this, Meredith Landing would be glad to help you find your next landing spot.
