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 How They 'Hate Hamlet' at Arizona Repertory Theatre. By Margaret Regan TELEVISION heartthrob Andrew Rally, late of LA Medical, has the chance of an acting lifetime: He's just won the part of Hamlet in New York's prestigious Shakespeare in the Park summer festival. His starstruck girlfriend, the Ophelia-like Deirdre (Adrienne Krocheski), is so excited that she has to breathe into a paper bag to stop hyperventilating.
His real-estate broker, airhead Felicia Dantine (Rebecca George), doesn't know much about Shakespeare. But she's so tickled to be dealing with the heir apparent to John Barrymore, the greatest of Hamlet players, that she's just installed Andrew in Barrymore's baronial old apartment off New York's Washington Square. There's a problem though, as the title of the play now at the UA's Arizona Repertory Theatre informs us: I Hate Hamlet. Alas, poor Andrew, played by the likable DeJon Mayes, is the one who hates Hamlet. Or maybe, he muses, it's just that he dislikes Hamlet. Or maybe it's just that he wants to wallow in television's seductive lucre. Or maybe his talents are just not up to the greatest part in the English language. Or this, or that. To act Hamlet or not to act Hamlet, that is Andrew's question. In fact, Andrew's vacillations about playing Hamlet precisely parallel the vacillations of Shakespeare's Danish prince about his duty to revenge his dead father. And like Hamlet, Andrew gets advice from a ghost. Barrymore himself (Milton Papageorge) is the only one who can solve the young man's unseemly dilemma. The fact that Barrymore's been dead for years is immaterial. A seance complete with thunderclaps and electrical blackouts extricates the great actor from his heavenly home. I Hate Hamlet is a silly-serious meditation on theatre and love, enlivened by wicked comparisons between Hollywood and the stage. Wonderfully written by Paul Rudnick, who also penned the play Jeffrey (seen at Upstairs Theatre Co. a season ago) and, more recently, the screenplays for Addams Family Values and In and Out, this Shakespeare sendup was a Broadway hit in 1991. (There are sprinklings of Shakespeare throughout, including a fragment of the balcony scene between Romeo and Juliet, enacted by Andrew and Deirdre). Naturally, the play comes down firmly on the side of serious theatre. One of its funniest creations is a hyphenated Hollywood writer-producer-director, Gary, deliciously rendered by Aaron Hartzler. Gary is out to lure Andrew back to television land. Television, he opines, coming at the end of thousands of years of theatrical evolution, after Greek drama and medieval minstrels and Shakespeare and vaudeville, is "art perfected. You can eat, you can talk, you don't even have to pay attention." It's up to the legendary Barrymore to counteract this pop-culture trumpery and entice the reluctant Andrew back to the theatrical angels. But the Barrymore who's come back to haunt the young actor isn't exactly a great role model: Just as in life, he's a bit of a lech and he loves his bottle overmuch. Still, he counsels Andrew on how to woo the virginal Deirdre (treat her the way Hamlet does Ophelia and he'll be a shoo-in, Barrymore advises). And give up the silly Method stuff and just Act.
In a preview performance last week, the pace was a little slow and there were some stumbles, literally, over the fine, complicated set by Clare P. Rowe, a faux-castle apartment fitted out with numerous platforms and steps. But these early wrinkles doubtless will be smoothed out. Even as it stands, this production makes for an entertaining evening, and there's at least one moment that transfixes the audience. When his recalcitrant Andrew finally begins to understand the mysteries of Shakespeare, Mayes utters Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech. He speaks it so feelingly and so flawlessly that we feel we're hearing it for the very first time.
I Hate Hamlet continues though Sunday, June 28,
at the UA Laboratory Theatre, near the southeast corner of Park
Avenue and Speedway. Shows are at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and
Saturday, and at 1:30 p.m. Sunday. (The production will get a
second run September 2 to 20.) Tickets are $16 general, $14 for
seniors and UA employees, $10 for students. For information or
reservations, call
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His agent, Lillian Troy (Susan d'Autremont), is thrilled Andrew
can now go beyond silly TV drama and even sillier TV ads (along
with a squirrel puppet, Andrew's a shill for a breakfast cereal).
This is funny, smart material, definitely. And the cast of student
actors, MFA candidates all, is adroitly professional. Still, director
Doug Finlayson could have pushed his players farther into the
sublimely silly. Mayes is persuasive as the irresolute actor,
but Papageorge's Barrymore is a little too just-folks. He's amusing
to be sure, as the idol gone to seed, but he'd be a lot funnier
if he were more pompous, more outrageous. To make a television
allusion, he could learn a little from the flamboyance of Jon
Lovitz's grandiloquent old Actor, in the old Saturday Night
Live skit about Acting with a capital A.
