‘True North’: Gripping, hilarious and a feat to behold

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

On Friday, there was no script. There wasn’t a scrap of plot. All the group of students had was a cast selected in advance and roughly 70 students amassed, all with the goal of creating a musical in just 48 hours. The project, which ran for the first time last year, was a Stanford Light Opera Company production. Students from across campus participated, bringing varying levels of prior experience in theater.

But as practically every seat filled up in Pigott Theater on Sunday, as the onstage orchestra warmed up, when almost a dozen actors began dancing and gliding across the stage singing one of the show’s opening numbers, “True North,” you could hardly tell. Over the next 60 minutes, the audience was swept up in the magic, nearly every step of the way. In “True North,” the show’s characters charted a path to the Arctic Circle. As insanity pulled the crew apart, they were caught between boiling flame and frigid chill. 

A woman (Maya Ordas ’27) in a red dress, red heels, red lipstick, shadows Captain North’s (Henry Cargill ’26) every move. The captain is the only soul who can see her. He slips from a boisterous crew party, taking long swigs from a bottle as he stumbles toward his cabin. All the while, “I miss you,” he pleads to The Red Lady, whom he calls Marielle. 

As he grows drunker and drunker, Captain North lets out bits and pieces of his story: Marielle was his wife. He lost her on their wedding day. He couldn’t save her from the fire. He seems merely drunk and heartbroken, all these years later. But as the musical continues, and The Red Lady keeps speaking to him, his heartbreak begins to look more and more like pure insanity. “You know it’s not enough, darling,” The Red Lady tells him ominously as she goads him into destroying the ship’s furnace, their only source of heat in the Arctic. 

Captain North is the nexus of extremes. His madness makes him believe the ship is broiling hot as he sends the vessel — and all those aboard — toward an icy grave.

In a moment of desperation, after destroying the furnace and still finding no respite from the imagined heat, he kneels, center stage, and takes clippers to his hair. For a few long, astonishing moments, the audience watched as Cargill shaved his real hair before their eyes.

In another room, a couple whose chemistry confused me from the start — Mira (Athena Naylor ’27) and Connor (Samuel Cousins ’28), an artist and cartographer lending their talents to the exploratory voyage — are pulling away from one another. Through the numbers “Stationary Love” and “Say What I Mean,” the audience sees their disparate goals in life come to bear. The show introduces Mira and Connor and proceeds to nearly immediately focus on their differences. As a result, I never had time to come to care about the couple before the plot ripped them apart.

Connor is thinking about proposing. He wants kids, he wants a family and most of all, he wants Mira to be his wife through it all. Mira wants nothing of the sort. In her hilariously absurd number “Fame! Wealth! Power!,” she sings that she wants exactly that — and a bit more — “Fame! Wealth! Imperial power!” she boasts in the final chorus. Even among a cast of impressive performers, Naylor proved to be a vocal powerhouse, displaying both extraordinary technique and infectious character in each of her numbers.

As Mira grows excited at the idea of power and Captain North deteriorates, she’s struck with an idea: She decides to throw a mutiny. And throw one she does. As the crew rallies behind her and the music crescendos, she draws a pistol, grappling Captain North away from the wheel before he can careen the ship into an iceberg. Suddenly, The Red Lady calls out to Mira: “Take the ring!” and Mira, flushed with power, grabs hold. She slides the ring onto her hand, and when Captain North throws himself into the sea in madness, “Marielle” doesn’t answer his calls. She sticks close to Mira, now, whispering in her ear.

The night was flecked with humor. I couldn’t fathom how the constant peppering of jokes, landing and landing and landing, were workshopped in a single night. There was wonder in every note, in every line, in even the moments that didn’t quite work (a few, seemingly improvised on the spot). And there was something marvel-worthy in the talent standing onstage and behind — in the costumes and the set design and perfectly-timed spotlights — in those who created something out of nothing, and brought it to the stage before us.

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