Looking for a Sound Manager for Windows

When I say sound manager, I'm not refering to iTunes. Rather, my problem is that I am supposed to do sound effects for a school play, but I can't find any software that's up to scratch to play them. Since ours is a very low-budget production, I'm probably going to be using a laptop to play the sound effects.
However, Windows Media Player or QuickTime is definitely not suited to this task, since the sounds take time to load after clicking play, and I want to be able to play sounds in a playlist without having them continuing one after the other. WMP or QT makes this task tedious and unpredictable. I'm contemplating Audacity (which has a solo function to play only one music channel), but it is after all for editing and not very suited to playing sounds. Setting it up also takes a good amount of time.
Is there something that can do it better? I can't combine all the sounds into one track, since the timing for the sounds must be based on what's happening on stage.