Reviews for Mary Moody Northen Theatre Performances
Review: City of Angels by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 13, 2010
Don't go expecting a straight story line. Chandler's whodunnits, unlike those of the tidy Agatha Christie, are mazes of deception anyway, and once the omniscient writer and the egotistical producer start making competing edits, you'll just lose the intrigue.
You have to be alert in this town to catch St. Edward's stagings at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre, off South Congress. They're of professional quality, well directed, well designed and well received. They even feature two or three Equity guest artists per production, whose participation spurs the already gifted St. Ed's students to even higher levels of accomplishment. Their productions flash across the horizon like meteors, though. Two weekends and that's it. …
Review: Peer Gynt by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 16, 2010
The dozen other members of the ensemble turn in the action like glittering, changing figures of a kaleidoscope, often singing commentary or accompanying themselves on guitar, violin, and clarinet.
You might get lost in the tidy space of St. Ed's Mary Moody Northen Theatre if you haven't done your homework before you get to the theatre. Peer Gynt is not your dependable old social realism from Ibsen. This story is a wild ride of fable, myth and allegory that takes you across the world and through an entire prankish life, written by a young dramatist who had escaped bleak Norway for the dazzling sunscapes of Italy.The …
Review: The Life of Galileo by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 16, 2009
. David Stahl inhabits that personality with the tidy self congratulation of Bilbo Baggins. He is impish rather than arrogant, and he's querulous about the tedious need to take students and to devise practical applications.
A lot is going on in Brecht's The Life of Galileo, and not just onstage. The program notes at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre will help you some, with a tidy summary of the historical figures, the heliocentric Ptolemaic model of the universe, and the heretical but accurate Copernican revision of it, and some of the elements of the plot. With that crib sheet you can comfortably follow the depiction of that impatient and skeptical scientist's lifetime …
Review: bobrauschenbergamerica by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 21, 2009
In a fine, dizzying moment Jamie Goodwin wheels solo at the center of the Mary Moody "theatre in the square," invoking the magnificence and eccentricity of America in an unannounced and uncredited text that some of us recognized as pages taken from wild old Walt's Leaves of Grass.
Don't go looking for Robert Rauschenberg the 20th century modern artist in this grab bag. This is homage purely by reference.Playwright/facilitator Charles Mee is frank in his admission that the piece is a collage of ideas and random bits that had as their starting points some of the images that appear in Rauschenberg's work.Mee and others free associated about those images. They collected texts and images and other random bits to share in theatre workshops. …
Review: The Pajama Game by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 20, 2009
Despite the predictable story line and the cardboard-cutout characters, we embrace the star power of this cast. There's plenty of toe-tapping and foolery, and the leads are bursting with talent.
Michael McKelvey and that talented cast at St. Ed's send us whizzing in a happy time machine back to 1954, when the American musical was in its full, ripe heyday. That was the age of Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Dilemma Is Resolved and All Live Happily Ever After. Into that sure-fire mix the producers stirred a crowd of Supporting Hoofers, an Eccentric or two and an Almost Villain; they seasoned it with a …
Review: Cyrano de Bergerac by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 16, 2009
Director Michelle Polgar orchestrates a fine, vigorous production of the wonderfully romantic French drama Cyrano de Bergerac.
Director Michelle Polgar orchestrates a fine, vigorous production of the wonderfully romantic French drama Cyrano de Bergerac, playing through this coming weekend at St Ed's Mary Moody Northen Theatre. Edmond Rostand modeled the lonely, pugnacious cavalier with the big nose on the historical figure of Hector Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, a duelist and dramatist who did, in fact, fight in the Thirty Years' War between the French and the Spanish.One of my French professors dismissed …