Reviews for Mary Moody Northen Theatre Performances
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 …
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 …
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 …
Review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 16, 2010
Christi Moore and her cast have created three hard drinkers condemned to retain fluency of invective and imagination without losing visions of disaster.
I knew that this was going to be intense. I had invited friends to see it with me, and we had seats in the middle of the front row, south side of the "theatre in the square" at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre. After Michelle Polgar had dedicated the opening night's performance to the memory of Oscar Brockett, that grand old man of Austin theatre, the lights began to fade and I had a feeling …
Review: The Imaginary Invalid by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 22, 2010
Diminutive sophomore Sophia Franzella is one to watch. She has this single scene in which her papa Argan interrogates her about the love antics of her sister, but it's a cajoling, beguiling knock-about success, greeted by spontaneous applause.
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin would not have objected at all to this re-do of his 1673 farce. He wrote The Imaginary Invalid in rapid-fire prose, using verse only for comic ballets at the intervals (omitted in this staging). David Chambers' translation/interpretation of the piece follows the action faithfully, although often with slangy word choices. Between them, Chambers and director David Long apply a clownification of the characters and a Borscht Belt leer not obvious in the original texts. David …