If we learned anything from Fat Ham, James Ijames’ Pulitzer Prize–winning riff on Shakespeare’s most famous play (on Broadway through July 2), it’s that Hamlet, at its heart, is all about a family. Any craziness—war, political upheaval, you name it—happening anywhere else is nothing compared with the drama unfolding in your own backyard.
Kenny Leon, director of the current intermittently satisfying Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet, knows this. Thus, he’s done away with anything that might detract from our tortured hero, Prince Hamlet (Ato Blankson-Wood), his murderous/usurping uncle, Claudius (the incomparable John Douglas Thompson), and his just-widowed mom, Gertrude (Lorraine Toussaint), who wed her dead hubby’s brother way too quickly.
Of course, Hamlet, Shakespeare’s longest play line by line, is nearly always cut for performance. In this case, the entire Norwegian subplot—all the talk of King Hamlet killing a Norwegian king to reclaim some land for Denmark, the minions that Claudius dispatches to Norway to try to keep Prince Fortinbras from attacking Denmark, and even young Fortinbras himself—has been eliminated. Excising Fortinbras gives Hamlet’s BFF, Horatio (Warner Miller), the play’s dramatic, and famous, last words: “Good night sweet prince,/ And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” However, without Fortinbras & Co. storming the stage at the end, we do lose the famous line “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.” (An FYI for all the R&G fans out there.)
More evidence of Leon’s family-first philosophy: His Hamlet begins with one momentous event—King Hamlet’s funeral—then segues seamlessly into another, Claudius and Gertrude’s wedding. (Hamlet’s “The funeral baked meats/ Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” dig has never sounded so apt.) Both events are underscored beautifully by music: a cappella hymns at the funeral service, and a love song performed by Ophelia (Solea Pfeiffer) to seal the marriage vows.
The songs—including the beautiful “Gods Cry,” written by Jason Michael Webb and Colby Lewis, first sung by the traveling players, and later reprised to great emotional effect by Horatio—have an easy contemporary feel that matches the setting; Leon has set his story in 2021 Atlanta, not long after the start of the pandemic…and, in fact, not long after the timing of his last Atlanta-set Shakespeare in the Park production, 2019’s Much Ado About Nothing. For Hamlet, now two-time Tony-winning set designer Beowulf Boritt (Act One and New York, New York) has built another of his stately brick mansions—one that looks like it might collapse at any moment (a metaphor if ever there as one).
Then the ghost of Hamlet’s dead father arrives, and suddenly we’re transported into a horror movie. It’s a bold choice—the voice of the ghost (provided by Samuel L. Jackson) possesses the house and an SUV that’s marooned outside, and, at one point, it even takes over Hamlet’s body—but it’s also a jarring one. Seen last season at the Delacorte as the lovestruck Orlando in Shaina Taub’s musical version of As You Like It, Blankson-Wood looks every inch the moody millennial; Jessica Jahn’s costumes (think combat boots, tons of black, and piles of gold jewelry) serve him well. But he seems far too level-headed to buy into all this voice-of-a-dead-dad business, let alone any kind of revenge plot. As Hamlet himself says, he is “too much in the sun.”
Hamlet opened June 28, 2023, at the Delacorte Theater and runs through Aug. 6. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
