Word: hamlet
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Shakespeare open season for 1939-40 started last week* when Maurice Evans reopened on Broadway in his last season's hit, an uncut Hamlet. It proved once again a much more tumultuous and exciting play than the usual cut version. Interesting minor change: This season Polonius wears spectacles, a detail which caused a great to-do among anachronism-chasers until they ascertained that glasses were worn in Shakespeare's day. Nobody seemed to care whether they were wtirn in Hamlet...
...Bard has his ups & downs on Broadway. He starts off with the box-office liability of being highbrow, with the box-office asset of commanding a small but steady audience made up largely of: 1) cultists -the kind of people who (depending on their age) have seen every Hamlet from Booth's, or Forbes-Robertson's, or Barrymore's, to Maurice Evans'; 2) seekers after the "worthwhile," who dutifully imbibe Shakespeare as they swallow Beethoven and spinach; 3) school children, offspring...
This nucleus cannot, however, keep any Shakespeare play on Broadway for long; the rest is a matter of showmanship. Among Shakespeare's works, Hamlet clearly has an edge because its hero's fascinating, elusive character interests many more people than Shakespeare does. But in general-as Shakespeare productions of the past few seasons bear out-neither a play's fame, nor its subject-matter, nor its length, nor its cast proves very much...
...tabloid Julius Caesar is a hit; so is a marathon Hamlet. A romantic play-Romeo and Juliet-starring Katharine Cornell, does well enough; a largely rhetorical one-King Richard II-starring a then not well-known Maurice Evans, does far better. Hamlet, with John Gielgud, then no name on Broadway, goes over big; with Leslie Howard, a big Broadway name, flops. Tallulah Bankhead cannot last a week in Antony and Cleopatra, Walter Huston cannot last a month in Othello. The simplest answer is almost certainly right: Shakespeare is as popular as his performance...
...Jean Tousseul's Jean Clarambaux (Lippincott, $3) is a long, gentle, nostalgic, sentimental novel of life in a Belgian hamlet before and during the German occupation of 1914-18. Though written with no little art, it has the warm, excessive, disconcerting and soporific sweetness of a bottomless feather...