Reviews for Mary Moody Northen Theatre Performances
Review: The Government Inspector by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 18, 2016
All the town's characters are stereotypes of self-importance, ripe for deflating. In the busy and buoyant action Gogol, Hatcher and director Polgar puncture them deftly and often.
Nikolai Gogol was only 25 when The Government Inspector was presented and published, and he'd already made a reputation for himself as a writer of short stories and the historical romance Taras Bulba, set in the Cossack region of his origins. Gogol had also proved an ignorant disaster when appointed professor of medieval history at the University of St. Petersburg. A romantic fleeing from his modest origins among the petty nobility of the Ukraine, he'd made …
Review: To Kill a Mockingbird by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 15, 2015
To Kill A Mockingbird maintains Harper Lee's condemnation of petty, malevolent and racist small-town Alabama while holding out hope for the future.
Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird is a comfortable and familiar story, an immediate success when it was published in 1960. My cousins in a small town in south Alabama were about the same age as Scout, the protagonist. They embraced the story and Harper Lee's sensitive portrait of small town life and the appalling effects of know-nothing racism. It took me a bit longer. First, because I didn't read the novel or see the 1962 …
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 epic. My favorite …
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 …