Reviews for Mary Moody Northen Theatre Performances
Review: Macbeth by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 23, 2024
MACBETH is spellbinding—if you already know the story and the text. MMNT design elements are haunting, but too often text scansion and intelligibility are lacking,
Macbeth, intrepid thane of Glamis promoted for valor to thane of Cawdor, is seduced by the lure of greatness and power. These are promised to him by the mendacious witches known as the weird sisters and by his lady wife, more avaricious and duplicitous than her soldier husband. Shakespeare's story, one of the infernal vortex and pit of ambition, is well served by the minimalist set design of Theada Haining and by Kathryn Eader's …
Review: INTO THE WOODS by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Vanessa Hoang Hughes
Published on April 26, 2024
Into The Woods directed by Jenny Lavery was a joy to experience, a fine production of a great piece of art.
What goes down when unlikely stories intertwine? Can witches be right, and giants be good? Into the Woods by James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim weaves numerous characters from different fairy tales into a single intertwining story. Wish fulfillment unravels in a whirlpool of chaos and confusion. The story depicts life, love, and loss with unlikely scenarios and Sondheim’s enchanting music. Even when dreams come true, not everything is as it seems; even when things go …
Review: Antigonick by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 27, 2023
This glittering enticement to the strange and wonderful world of Greek drama gives no time to address the deep moral question inherent in Antigone's story.
A long time ago, distinguished Classics professor Dr. Charles Stow commented to his Greek Theatre class, "No one performs these plays they way they were written." That was a scholar's somber statement of fact. In antiquity, three masked actors stood in the amphitheatre and declaimed. A chorus stood unmoving and responded in strophes, with the chorus leader sometimes speaking individually. Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides used formal language to explore legends deeply familiar to the entire …
Review: Luchadora by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 20, 2023
LUCHADORA is a charming and useful fable, a tale about growing up cross-cultural and embracing the heroic. Compliments to Becca Jimenez, who played the protagonist Vanessa on opening night,.
Parents have their secrets, even responsible and affectionate parents, and children don't often discover them. Especially not when the offspring is still a child; single children—those without siblings—probably even less often. But there's a magic at work as one approaches adulthood and develops into a person uncannily like one or the other parent. Or both. "Coming of age" and "quest" stories have always resounded, whether told beside a campfire, in a novel or movie, …
Review: Godspell by Mary Moody Northen Theatre, February 16 - 26, 2023
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 19, 2023
This joyful, kaleidoscopic production of GODSPELL gives every performer, clad in colorfully eclectic, sometimes eccentric garb, plenty of chances to shine.
First of all, the group photo in publicity for Godspell at St. Edward's University is misleading. Those young persons regard Che Greeno as the Jesus character with solemn expectancy, while he focuses serenely on the heavens. It could have been clipped from an earnest Sunday school magazine. It's static. The people are submissive. Greeno appears about ready to leave them all behind as he ascends to heaven. I'll say it: in this Godspell, it …
Review: These Shining Lives by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 15, 2022
Director Lara Toner and the Mary Moody Northen Theatre deliver a sincere, open-hearted performance of a script that concentrates exclusively upon harm caused initially by ignorance and subsequently by willful ignorance.
At the heart of These Shining Lives are the remarkable matched performances of Sonia Mariah Fonseca and Christina Hollie as young industrial workers painting luminiscent numbers onto clockfaces at the Radium Dial Company in the 1920's and 1930's. Lara Toner's choice in casting and directing them was perceptive. Her direction brings them gradually together, a melding of opposites. Fonseca—petite, initially timid, and vulnerable—is Catherine, the lead, with a heartbreaking story arc. A young …