Reviews for Mary Moody Northen Theatre Performances
Review: Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 04, 2015
Washburn's work is a think piece with worthy aims, but it fails to connect with the audience precisely because of its thesis.
American popular imaginings of recent years have been enamoured of dystopian tales of post-industrial collapse. It's not a new trope: Orson Welles' 1939 War of the Worlds hinted at it and Neville Shute's 1959 On the Beach haunted a Western world newly conscious of the H-Bomb. Hollywood has been tearing civilization apart with CGI-FX glee for decades; the first Mad Max movie was in 1979. Cormac McCarthy's 2006 The Road is a stark father-and-son survival …
Misalliance, by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 18, 2015
Misalliance is a wickedly comic send-up of men's pretensions, particularly the older generation that's ever eager to court fetching young women. Shaw hasn't left these womenfolk defenseless, however.
GBS is at his best when he's throwing characters at one another, and this unexpected weekend in the country does just that. He pits the prosperous, self-satisfied merchant class against the drone-like aristocrats, petulant daughter against parents, the lasciviousness of the old against the real derring-do of a Polish adventuress, a practical wife against her straying but generous husband, and a desperate, impoverished clerk with a pistol against the whole edifice of money and class. …
Review: Merrily We Roll Along by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 07, 2014
If you present a tragedy backwards, does it become a comedy? That's the gimmick used by Kaufmann and Hart in 1934, updated by George Furth and Stephen Sondheim and turned into a musical in 1981. Our protagonist Frank Shepard, played with quiet insensitivity and great courtesy by Scott Shipman, appears in the opening scene set in 1976, surrounded by the busy adulation of Hollywood phonies. If you're not expecting the gimmick, you might be confused …
Review: Tartuffe by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 18, 2014
Have you discovered the Mary Moody Northen Theatre at St. Edward's University yet? It's probably the best-kept open theatre secret in town. For decades the university's theatre department has brought Equity actors to work with their undergraduates. Early on the department brought those pros in from either the East Coast or the Left Coast, and results could be colorful and unpredictable. In recent years, and certainly over the last decade, the St. Ed's teachers have …
Review: Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding) by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 21, 2013
Federico García Lorca's Bodas de Sangre takes places in the stark and arid landscape of the mind. The setting is rural Spain, somewhere far out in the countryside, and the characters are peasant families. They have no names, with the single exception of Leonardo, the angry and frustrated young farmer who precipitates the tragedy. García Lorca identifies the others by role: the intended groom (novio), the bride (novia), the mother, the neighbor, the father of …
Review: The Importance of Being Earnest by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 19, 2013
This play is as toothsome as a plate of scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam. My one request would have been, "Please, may I have some more?" By that, I mean that I'd really like to have seen more.
The delightful wit and frivolity of Oscar Wilde's conceit for this play and the immense seriousness his characters apply to it make The Importance of Being Earnest an enduring favorite. This is the fourth staging of the work in the region since I began writing about theatre nearly five years ago, and it never grows stale. Wilde is not Shakespeare, but his work has a similar vitality and adaptability. His razor-sharp teasing of a distinct …