To go or not to go? That is the question! Technically it’s ‘be’ or ‘not be’ but with Shakespeare being hundreds of years of dead, I’m sure he’ll grant us this liberal creative license…especially considering what the world at large is doing to his canon from a musical standpoint! I won’t extoll and wax poetic like Polonius, earning me an eyeroll from Laertes and Ophelia, no I shall to the point as brevity is the soul of wit.
When the play opens with the infamous “To be or not to be…” you start to think time is out of joint. Or maybe that you’ve just misremembered how Hamlet starts? You ever look at one of those maps of the United States where all the states have been shoved around into different spaces in the outline but it still mostly looks like the outline of the country even though everything is all discombobulated?
Shakespeare Theatre Company brings its
Summer Free For All program to life for a 29th season, this year reviving its
2018 production of Hamlet, originally directed by Michael Kahn and
remounted by Artistic Associate Craig Baldwin, and starring Michael Urie as the
title role. The show is a power-packed run at over 3 hours, but a scattered
performance from the cast and an incohesive design leaves the audience feeling
every minute of it.
Words, words, words. Not to read, but to hear, and Shakespeare did write so many of them, five act’s worth for arguably his most infamous tragedy, Hamlet. Appearing now as a limited engagement, the Royal Shakespeare Company brings their evocative conflagration of a production to The Eisenhower Theatre inside The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Directed by Simon Godwin, this spellbinding, razor’s edge modernity casts new light on the Bard’s most treasured tragedy,
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go. By that logic, theatergoers should be rushing out to Shakespeare Theater Company for Michael Kahn’s production of Hamlet starring Michael Urie as the mad Danish prince. Disturbingly dystopian, albeit conceptually undercooked, this production marks the end of an era as Michael Kahn, the show’s director and the company’s long-standing artistic director, makes it his final production before retiring. Not without impressive performances given by the featured player and others,
Suit the action to the word and the word to the action! The word is shows without intermission are the new trend and the action is to apply it Shakespeare. Susquehanna Shakespeare Ensemble is boldly running an endurance test— for both audience and ensemble— with the Bard’s most renowned tragedy, Hamlet. Directed by company founder and Artistic Head Marshall B. Garrett, this DIY-Fringe style production of the Danish Prince’s woe is surprisingly accurate in both delivery and conceptualization,
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Thinking on the whole that Compass Rose Theater is delivering a good production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not a bad thought to have. Directed by Lucinda Merry-Browne, one of the Bard’s most iconic tragedies treads the boards in its most simplistic form. A harkening back to basic Shakespeare in the intimate black-box theatre, the production plants itself on solid ground and delivers a curious approach to madness as a central focus of these time-tested characters.
An audience knows what to expect and that is all they are prepared to believe in. Such a premise as this is where the initial notion of “suspending one’s disbelief” came from, and thus theatrical extemporanea, et. al and so forth. When playwright Tom Stoppard dared the audience to believe in his tertiary character-exploration of Hamlet, he had no idea that Stillpointe Theatre would be putting their hands all over Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in only a way that this innovative,
The mayhem never stops over at Cohesion Theatre Company and their latest mount to the stage is truly wondrous strange. Taking William Shakespeare’s Hamlet to task, Director Alice Stanely refocuses the driving forces of the plot’s actions and tunes them into the highly potent pathos of grief. Coping with loss is never easy, and the ways in which human beings express these feelings are nothing short of evocative, stirring, and daringly dramatic as witnessed in this production.
“But whate’er I be, nor I, nor any man that but man is, with nothing shall be pleased till he be eased with being nothing.” A profoundly Zen quote to come from the tongue of Shakespeare. Uttered by the title character of Richard II, which is now playing at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company under the direction of Kevin J. Costa, the quote brings to mind a different way of viewing life and of viewing Shakespeare’s tragic histories.
Everybody lies. Shakespeare was teaching it long before House. In a newly adapted physical translation of the Bard’s greatest tragedy, Off the Quill presents their interpretation of Hamlet: Believe None of Us. Fully formulating the quote of “oh what tangled webs we weave when we practice to deceive,” this new dance-based performance has all of the recognizable quotes and characters but with a few major plot altering elements that may leave you questioning what exactly happened to the crowned Prince of Denmark.