Brush Up Your Shakespeare: Hamlet Goes Hollywood

As an avid theatre-goer, I’ve noticed lately that major stage productions seem to be relying more and more on effects that can only be called cinematic. In the early years, the motion picture industry was clearly envious of the public prestige enjoyed by live theatre. Broadway plays and Broadway stars were quickly snatched up by Hollywood, and it’s remarkable how many movies of the Thirties and Forties (in particular) focus on stage-based plotlines. See, for instance, Busby Berkeley gems like Forty-Second Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade, all of which pretend to be about the staging of Broadway musical extravaganzas, although the numbers they contain (full of fancy overhead shots, for instance) could only have been made on a soundstage. 

 That was then. Now Broadway has discovered that playgoers willing to shell out the big bucks to see a show in person appreciate flashy cinematic touches. I recently saw the touring company of Harry  Potter and the Cursed Child, and was impressed by its many magical moments. This was skillfully handled stage magic, though (disappearances, transformations, pyrotechnic effects, and so on), and thus was thoroughly a part of theatrical tradition. But several award-winning shows on Broadway right now feel justified by their subject matter for introducing video in heavy doses to the stage production. I have to confess that I haven’t seen either one, so I can’t comment on how successful these experiments might be. Nonetheless . . .  

 Good Night, and Good Luck is an historical drama about the very public conflict between venerated newscaster Edward R. Murrow and the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy. George Clooney, who directed and co-wrote the 2005 film, makes his Broadway debut in the Edward R. Murrow role. Because the play has a great deal to say about news reporting and about the impact of television on the American public, it’s perhaps not surprising to learn that it culminates in a video montage of updated archival footage that includes the destruction of the World Trade Center and the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.  

 More film-centric, of course, is the current revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicalized Sunset Boulevard, for which the talented but (I would argue) under-age Nicole Scherzinger just won an acting Tony. The 1950 movie drama about a fading film star, directed by Billy Wilder with a remarkable Gloria Swanson in the leading role, has naturally led to a stage production that is all about movies and movie-making. As the L.A. Times reviewer put it, in this production “the camera is undeniably king. The darkened stage, swathed in movie projector fog, seems like a studio set in which dreams are manufactured through live projections along with more traditional Hollywood means.”  Live camera feeds are used at times to follow the actors, and this Norma Desmond, up there on the stage, definitely gets her close-up.  

 Then there’s the new Hamlet, adapted and directed by Robert O’Hara, appearing now at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum. For much of its length it is a somewhat traditional Shakespearean tragedy, though drastically cut and highlighting anything potentially raunchy. Then everything implodes into a behind-the-scenes noir with a gumshoe who’s a blend of Sam Spade and Benoit Blanc investigating who did what to whom, on behalf of the suits at the Elsinore Film Corporation. Why? I don’t rightly know. It’s fun to see the spilling out of secrets not in Shakespeare’s original text, and I liked some of the inevitable cinematic touches (like the appearance of Hamlet’s father’s ghost on a huge screen). But what does it add to Hamlet? Really, not much at all. 

 

                                    Nicole Scherzinger in Broadway's Sunset Boulevard

 

"Hamlet" at L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum