Reviews for Mary Moody Northen Theatre Performances
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 …
Review: Romeo and Juliet by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 23, 2018
In this Romeo and Juliet the young persons are the story, and they carry the story. Director Robert Tolaro uses his three older Equity actors wisely, leaving room for the hot-blooded, the love-struck and the lovelorn.
Every teen deserves to attend a good staging of Romeo and Juliet, and the production now at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre is just that. On opening night I happened to sit next to a young woman who was thrilled by the opportunity. Not a student at St. Edward's University either; she'd read the play in high school and had watched Zeffirelli's film over and over again, and she was rapt to see that …
Review: ANON(ymous) by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 13, 2017
There's a happy ending in this production for children, but it presents faint reassurance amid strong suggestions of murder, immigrant deaths by drowning, stifling and road accident, human trafficking, sexual coercion, and cannibalism via sausage grinding.
There's a curious two-dimensionality to Naomi Iizuki's Anon(ymous). It's billed as a modern take on The Odyssey, and the rough correspondences aren't too hard to make out: a central character who's washed up ashore when a ship goes down and an episodic structure in which he's rescued and held by a nymph, later encounters and defeats a cyclops, and receives occasional visitations from a goddess; there's even a woman forestalling a suitor by night …