Reviews for Mary Moody Northen Theatre Performances
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 …
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 …
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 …
Review: On the Verge (or The Georgraphy of Longing) by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 08, 2011
Overmyer's dialogue is often as rich as blank verse, deserving of a good tasting in the mouth, but Long and his players are usually moving too fast to let us savor it.
"Bebe Rebozo!" Those two words summarize the wit and triviality of Eric Overmyers' On the Verge (or The Geography of Longing), now playing at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre at St. Edward's University. I laughted at the sudden illumination of an impression from 40 years ago. Bebe Rebozo - Richard Nixon's buddy. The Florida banker. The guy with the home in Key Biscayne where our Darth Vader president took refuge from the demands of office. …
Review: Eurydice by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 10, 2011
The cast and production team produce Ruhl's sweet song of the end of life and time with elegant simplicity.
In Sarah Ruhl's world, stones can talk, the dead can send letters to the living, and the devil connives to send a fragile bride to her death so he can court her in the afterlife. On the far side of the river of forgetting, memory fades and the ability to read disappears. Young Orpheus, bereft in this life, telephones a long-distance information operator in an effort to try to locate his dead wife. Despite the …