Unicorn’s genre-bending Magic Valley Community Theatre’s Little Women is beguiling yet baffling
Photo by Don Ipock
I love the Unicorn Theatre when it takes chances. As is our social contract, their latest is a world premiere of a show I couldn’t expect to see anywhere else. The last calendar year has seen the Midtown venue deliver on some of KC’s best work, and unfortunately, creative director Ernie Nolan is overseeing some of the most puzzling. I can recognize the shows that are simply a miss for me personally, or the ones that feel like an actual puzzle to be solved later, but with a few recent productions I’ve found myself scanning the room… hoping to take the temperature of the rest of the audience, and perhaps even find guidance. Unicorn’s current mainstage production is the most I’ve felt the entire space—audience and the performance itself—adrift.
To quote a character from the show: “I’m an aficionado of experimental theater. And I’m not sure you’ve done your job.”
Nolan directs Magic Valley Community Theatre’s Little Women, a show within a show with elements that should be an easy slam dunk. Set in an amateur production of Louisa May Alcott’s classic, the small cast are not only the stars of a time-limited competitive play but also wears many hats as choreographers, writers, and directors. Their unorthodox adaptation of Little Women features dance numbers and plenty of liberties taken with the original text—all to the chagrin of the theater’s benefactor.
Non-professionals struggling to separate their personal lives from their performance is our primary focus here, as a revolving stage pivots us from the haphazard players facing the audience to the much messier backstage struggles.
MVCT’s Little Women has a tremendous foundation here—the ability to pair a Noises Off! comedy about a theater attempting to plow through a series of escalating problems and the struggle to prevent the fictional audience from becoming aware. Instead, the tones are inverted. The production of Little Women has sincere performances that rarely call any attention to the missteps or quirks of the players. Backstage, a love triangle (that might’ve been written with a different vibe in mind) comes off like a thriller, with characters teetering on the edge in a manner less fun-manic and more Coen Brothers.
And I’ll be honest: I was knocked off my footing a bit by the subversion. “The part of the show that’s supposed to be bad is pretty fine by community theater standards and we’re spinning the stage to watch things get dark?” Cool, I’m keen on seeing where that goes! But that’s… not it either. MVCT’s Little Women is a play/musical where things happen, and those things are divorced from any of the bountiful backstory we’ve been given about the players. But worse, they’re divorced for any sense of what MVCT’s Little Women wants its viewers to feel.
That is, until a finale that goes big and silly and fantastical and carries through to the curtain call with yet another distinctly separate show in an 80-minute runtime? This is also an increasingly common choice under Nolan’s Unicorn. Shows that seem unsure how to resolve steer into clap-along finales that leave me dazed in my walk to the parking lot. To round out a play that arrived almost stern instead of jovial, and which offered minimal guidance along the way, to end on risers and bubble guns, insisting in flashing lights “THIS IS FUN”… it is disorienting at best.
Magic Valley Community Theatre’s Little Women has a few intriguing ideas, but I genuinely have no concept of how it hoped the audience would react to them. The show runs through December 7, 2025, on the Levin Stage. Tickets are available here.
Photo by Don Ipock
