Reviews for Mary Moody Northen Theatre Performances
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 sector of …
Review: Measure for Measure by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 19, 2013
The three Equity actors are fine and capable professionals, but I was left with the feeling that there was entirely too little room for St. Ed's undergraduate talent in the production.
Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare's darkest plays, an intimate and claustrophobic study of misrule. There are no great battles here, no dazzling displays of fancy; this mythical Vienna has a stifling ambiance, a combination of bureaucratic neglect, fetid bordello and sterile cloister. One can seek to read it as a comedy, which to some extent director Michelle Polgar has done, but one can also see it as a meditation on zealotry. Vincentio, Duke …
Review: The Crucible by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 23, 2012
Fully physically mature Equity actors occupy the key roles in The Crucible, helping to establish the rhythm, tension and impact. Among the student actors in this cast, Johnny Joe Trillayes and Sophia Franzella rise to the same level.
One measure of the power of Arthur Miller's drama about the Salem witch trials of 1692 is the startling transformation of familiar actors. Tiny Sophia Franzella, now a junior at St. Edward's, has charmed audiences with her wildly comic and mischievous personae in The Imaginary Invalid, Urinetown and A Year with Frog and Toad. Here, as the malicious and vindictive accuser Abigail Williams, Franzella is smooth faced duplicity, a murderous woman-child driven by spite and lust. Hers is a …
Review: A Lie of the Mind by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 15, 2011
A Lie of the Mind is a hard evening with a bunch of no-hopers who might just be hybrids of The Stupids and The Nastys -- 'Deliverance'-style degenerates, except that they're out somewhere in the great American West.
Sam Shepard wrote and directed A Lie of The Mind off Broadway in 1985. It won awards as best play then and the 2010 New York production won the Lucille Lortel award as best revival. Musing over the claustrophobic evening with these characters, I recalled Harry Allard's picture book collaboration with James Marshall in the 1970's featuring a charmingly inept cartoon family named The Stupids. A Lie of the Mind is a hard evening with a bunch of …
Review: The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 12, 2011
Playwright Whitty starts with an intriguing hypothetical: what happens to Ibsen's Hedda Gabler after she so famously commits suicide in the last scene of the 1890 play of the same name?
The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler by Jeff Whitty has an abundance of clever and not much of depth or heart. Director David M. Long does a bang-up job of making it a whizzing entertainment, having recruited three gifted Equity professionals to work with the six St. Ed's Equity-candidate actors relegated to secondary roles. Playwright Whitty starts with an intriguing hypothetical: what happens to Ibsen's Hedda Gabler after she so famously commits suicide in the …
Review: Carousel by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 14, 2011
Carousel is a gorgeous thing out of another time. The story is simple. So are the characters, who for the most part good folk of the land, just as in Oklahoma!, the hit just two years earlier by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Carousel is a gorgeous thing out of another time. The story is simple. So are the characters, who for the most part good folk of the land, just as in Oklahoma!, the hit just two years earlier by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Carousel is a story of courting, disappointment in marriage between carnival tough Billy Bigelowe and bright-eyed local girl Julie Jordan, a robbery attempt and the bad end of the Bigelowe, then, unexpectedly, a counseling session in …