TT: Hamlet & Co.

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I report on three shows that I saw in Florida while the snow was falling up north: Orlando Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Mad Cow Theatre’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Florida Rep’s You Can’t Take It With You. All are excellent. Here’s an excerpt.
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The Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s “Hamlet” looks on paper like a standard-issue high-concept production, transplanted from ancient Denmark to Victorian England. But Richard Width and Bob Phillips, the director and set designer, have stirred in a cupful of spooky horror-show populism, pumping the stage full of mist and making eye-catching use of a stategically positioned trap door. One might almost be watching an unusually literate vampire flick aimed at a youthful audience, an impression reinforced by Avery Clark’s flamboyantly physical performance of the title role….
All this makes for one of the most theatrically potent “Hamlets” I’ve seen in a good many seasons, far fresher than last year’s Jude Law-powered Broadway production and, I suspect, more accessible to boot….
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” is being performed to similarly fine effect across town by Mad Cow Theater, a small but ambitious company that specializes in contemporary fare (Tracy Letts’ “Superior Donuts” opens there next month). Performed in a black-box theater on a set consisting of seven doors in a curved white wall, this production discreetly underlines the debt owed by Mr. Stoppard to the Samuel Beckett of “Waiting for Godot.” Michael Marinaccio and Timothy Williams play the title characters like a cross between Vladimir-and-Estragon and Abbott-and-Costello, which is just right…
The Pulitzer Prize for drama, like the best-picture Oscar, rarely goes to uncomplicatedly funny plays, but in 1937 the judges made a welcome exception and gave it to “You Can’t Take it With You,” the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart comedy about an extended family whose variously eccentric members have all chosen to renounce worldly ambition and (as the saying goes) follow their bliss. A year later Frank Capra’s film version knocked down a best-picture Oscar, thereby sealing the original play’s long-standing reputation as a classic of American comedy.
Alas, the last Broadway revival of “You Can’t Take It With You” opened more than a quarter-century ago, and professional productions have become comparatively rare. This is mainly because the play calls for a cast of 19, thus putting it out of the reach of cost-conscious regional companies, though the fact that Capra’s film was so portentously windy doesn’t help. Not so the Florida Repertory Theatre’s festive new staging, which is as light and sweet as fresh-spun cotton candy….
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Read the whole thing here.