Review of The Plagiarists' The Feast of St. McGonagall

Once upon a time I went to a show and it was called The Feast of Saint McGonagall. It was about a man (Jack Dugan Carpenter) who put together a feast to celebrate the life and death of this terrible poet McGonagall and also it was about McGonagall telling stories of his adventures to his friends and colleagues. McGonagall is a terrible poet because he doesn't really understand what poetry is. Poetry is expressing beautiful and terrible things happening and expressing them through rhyme and meter. He doesn't make anything that he does interesting. Poetry is supposed to make you have feelings, but his poems make me feel sorry for him that he didn't understand poetry the way he should. I think Jessica Wright Buha wrote the play about McGonagall because she wanted people to sympathize with him. And I did kind of sympathize with him.

I thought the story about McGonagall (Kristen T. King in this case) going to see the Queen (Amber Gerencher) and how he completely did not understand the letter that said the Queen does not want your poetry. He said, "The Queen wants my poetry. I am going to go there!" And after he got turned away by one of the Queen's doormen, he went over to this little farm and there was a man there (Ken Miller) and he told him all about the different poems. And I thought that was a very touching part, that showed McGonagall just wanted to share his poetry and he wanted it to be good but it wasn't. They made a little rock path out of chairs which I thought was an interesting idea.

I thought it was nice that they had a piano on stage because it was useful to the songs. "The Rattling Boy from Dublin Town" was a very bad song and I thought it was great that they made it so funny by acting it out. I thought it was funny that the girl who played McGonagall's wife (Sara Jean McCarthy) played the girl in the song. The song was about a rambunctious boy (Erika Haaland) from a town who wanted to marry a lady but there was another man (James Dunn) who loved her and she loved him better than the rambunctious boy. They used pool noodles for swords which I thought was really funny. The pool noodles idea was made by Christopher Walsh; he choreographed the fights.

"The Tay Bridge Disaster" was his poem that got the most attention because people thought it was so terrible for people to be remembered this way. It was sad that this bridge went down and they were all on it. At the end the poem it is not like "this was a terrible thing and I am sad about it." He says "this was a terrible thing and they should have used buttresses." You shouldn't waste your time to write a poem to tell that; you should just write to the newspapers and the railway company to tell them to put buttresses.

In this play there were lots of different people playing McGonagall. Everybody played McGonagall! Maybe they wanted to show the change between each McGonagall. I thought they should have stuck to one gender, or even better just one person playing McGonagall. The characters changing all the time made me feel like I was seeing seven different characters running around the stage.

People that would like this show are people that like bad poets, feasts, pool noodles, and buttresses. If you go to this show you will learn more about McGonagall than you ever did before. It is good to know about McGonagall because this is a holiday that happens in Scotland. And if you are a kid that is my age, it would be a good holiday to share with a friend or a class because not many people know about this holiday except for people in Scotland.

Photos: Jasmine Basci