2026 Audience Reviews

Company: Moonlight Muses LLC
Show: In The Moonlight
Venue: Center for Performing Arts

A fun performance limited by tech and writing

The strength of this show is very much contained in the strength of the cast. The singing was powerful, the acting excellent, the dancing . . . sufficient, with some notable standouts who really brought the energy the show was clearly relying on to get through some of the clunkier moments. The music and choreography were also notably good, leveraging the skill of the performers on the music side and compensating for the limited skill in the case of choreography. Unfortunately, a combination of technical issues and writing issues kept it from being a performance that you could get truly lost in. The use of microphones in the small space led to a dissonance when singers were hitting their big notes, which dulled the impact they would have otherwise had. This also created a difficulty in hearing exact words during louder moments, and that meant that sometimes critical explanations of what was happening got lost, leading to confusion as you try to infer why the characters’ situations seemed to suddenly shift without warning. Finally, the inclusion of a phone-based audience poll in the second act was subject to the problems such things always are – not everyone can connect immediately, things on the screen are blocked from certain angles and people have to move or ask for information, there’s the crushing sense that we could have just done a show of hands and it would have kept the show moving along. That momentum loss really hurts, because we’re going into a critical moment where someone in the cast will be declared guilty, and taking two minutes for a straw poll kills the tension. The writing also struggled with keeping the tension, mostly because rather than being a murder mystery drama, it was a drama story and a crime story that happened to intersect at a particular point in time. The premise of a (good) murder mystery is that the audience is given clues and evidence that allow them to deduce the true culprit, if they can look past the ways in which the evidence is intended to be misleading. The courtroom scenes would have been the ideal place to drop this evidence and have a fast talking prosecutor make circumstantial but compelling cases against each defendant, reinforced by the fact that we saw all suspects acting suspiciously in the moments leading up to the murder. But instead the courtroom was focused on the drama storyline, and so no evidence is given and none of the characters are made to seem particularly invested in finding the truth. When the true murderer is revealed, none of the falsely accused suspects are even there to find out which makes it feel isolated from what is going on in the rest of the story. The drama plotline, in contrast, is a perfectly serviceable execution of a love triangle but gets sidelined by a murder happening and the need to spend time familiarizing us with characters who are important for the murder plotline but not the drama plotline. Ultimately I think the premise could have worked if the murder thread and drama thread had been tied together just a little closer, perhaps by having one of the drama cast care about finding the truth of the murder and learning something about their wants and needs in the drama portion from that investigation. But without anything more binding the different aspects together, it felt like we jumped from scene to scene without an emotional throughline that kept them feeling like one story. As critical as I have been here, I want to emphasize that the show was still fun to watch. You have to be willing to meet the energy it brings and play along where it asks you to, and perhaps be willing to forgive some awkward transitions. But the Fringe is exactly the place to try things and learn from experience, and if you’re going to watch someone learn the ropes you might as well do it listening to an exceptional cast.