It ain't Greek to me
Rating: 4
Greatest Speech of All Time
KC Fringe Festival
The show is wrongly titled, as it is not one speech but a series of great speeches in a one-man show that entertains the audience with a selected variety of great speeches that stretch from Socrates to Shakespeare to Dr. Martin Luther King.
Tim Mooney undertook selecting speeches and excerpts from famous speeches that stood the test of time and still play well for today's audience. The amount of material memorized and presented culminates a monumental undertaking as Mooney rapid fire talks for one solid hour, delivering outstanding orations from times past.
While Mr. Mooney is a wonderful performer, his delivery was fast and rapid-fire like Harold Hill of "The Music Man". I would have preferred carefully chiseled shorter passages that used the intent of the words to deliver the message rather than the rapid pace he needed to get the entire speech presented.
While I did enjoy his performance, I thought he could have paced the speeches better, altered the tone and speed of delivery, and created more of the character in each instance. His strongest moments were in the first part of Marc Antony's praise of Caesar at the funeral and later when he gave FDR's speech that foreshadowed similar situations that America now faces.
Still, the show is well worth seeing, especially for those who may have studied those characters and read or heard some of their speeches. Socrates and Frederick Douglass may be lost on a general audience.
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