Shakespeare in the Park Review—“Hamlet” in Central Park

Hamlet

Written by William Shakespeare; directed by Kenny Leon

Performances through August 6, 2023

Delacorte Theater, Central Park, New York, NY

publictheater.org

Ato Blankson-Wood and Solea Pfeiffer in Hamlet (photo: Joan Marcus)

Shakespeare in Central Park has always been a crap shoot. Since the overriding ethos is to please 2000 people who have gotten free tickets on a steamy summer night in Manhattan, even good stagings are not quite as good as they should be. Rarely is there a truly great production at the Delacorte Theater, and Hamlet, despite good performances and interesting directorial touches, strains to be decent.

Kenny Leon has trimmed the play—as most directors do—to a fleet 2 hours and 45 minutes, mostly eliminating the political and martial subplots. This streamlines the play to concentrate on Prince Hamlet’s strained relationships with his mother, who has married his uncle (her brother-in-law) right after the funeral of his father, the king, and with his sometime girlfriend Ophelia, whose own father, Polonius, and brother, Laertes, are also thorns in his side. Basically, it drops material that the Delacorte audience might find puzzling on Beowulf Boritt’s cleverly off-kilter and apparently post-apocalyptic (or post-pandemic) set that’s populated by a trashed Stacey Abrams election sign, abandoned Range Rover and a portrait of Hamlet’s dad in an American army uniform.

Usually, the most annoying Central Park bits are those shoehorned in with no regard for whether they make any sense: and, of course, these are often the biggest crowd-pleasers. It’s no different in Hamlet, as songs by Jason Michael Webb—nicely sung by members of the cast, especially the creamy-voiced Solea Pfeiffer, who also makes a quite sympathetic Ophelia—are heard throughout, most damagingly at the end, destroying the emotional catharsis of Horatio’s immortal words after Hamlet’s death.

Otherwise, Leon paces the play well, delicately balancing the undercurrents of melancholy and black humor, like the rollicking gravedigger scene, played with knowing hilarity by both Ato Blankson-Wood as Hamlet and Greg Hildreth as the gravedigger. Blankson-Wood, who at times seems too young for such an overwhelming role, is nevertheless poised onstage, reciting Shakespeare’s poetry as if he actually knows its meaning, unlike certain other actors on the Delacorte stage. 

It’s only in the ill-conceived ghost scene, in which Samuel L. Jackson, of all people, intones the thunderous voice of the murdered king and in which Leon, for some reason, has the dead father’s spirit enter Hamlet, who then lip-synchs the ghost’s lines as if it’s an outtake from The Exorcist, does Blankson-Wood overdo it, with risible eye-rolling and hamming it up that’s at odds with the rest of his confident performance.

There’s also good acting from John Douglas Thompson, who, as Hamlet’s murderous uncle turned stepfather Claudius, always enunciates beautifully; the formidable Lorraine Toussaint as Hamlet’s confused mother Gertrude; and a vibrant Warner Miller as a hip-hop Horatio. Less good is Daniel Pearce, who, as Polonius, pushes too hard for laughs in every line, even though Shakespeare has already written him as a buffoonish windbag. Unsurprisingly, Pearce is the audience favorite.

Still, this is a competent, coherent Hamlet, which, for a summer night at Central Park, just might be enough.