Word: hamlets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...quiet than when kinetic (no matter whom she plays, her posture and gestures look the same). The personal text is better acted, if sometimes too cute. Her impersonations range from dead-on (Maggie Smith) to unrecognizable (Olivier). There are two telling exceptions: she is stunning as both Cordelia and Hamlet, speaking of their fathers, one remote, one dead. Here art unmistakably resonates with life...
...glory without the fame. The distinction is explained by a character in Rudnick's 1991 Broadway comedy I Hate Hamlet: "Fame pays better. Fame has beachfront property. Fame needs bodyguards." But Rudnick's pay is fine, thanks. He doesn't need Malibu acreage; he has a dashingly ornate apartment -- one previously tenanted by John Barrymore, just like the I Hate Hamlet flat -- in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Rudnick would laugh off bodyguards; he is an unguarded fellow in an edgy age. "Paul is so charming," says his old friend William Ivey Long, a Tony-winning costume designer, "that you suspect...
Many critics agree that Shakespeare was a fine playwright. Of his plays, many of the same critics praise Hamlet in particular. But this megahit does feature two flat characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who appear, fawn sycophantically over everything that moves, and then disappear, apparently to die horribly for no particular reason...
Stoppard, intrigued by these passive, undifferentiated non-characters, tries to reconstruct the drama of Hamlet from their point of view. He intersperses his own imagined dialogue with the actual text of Shakespeare's play, to create a fascinating new perspective on Hamlet, drama, the human condition and flipping coins...
...most painful criticism of all for Aspin is that he remains conceptually a Congressman, with neither the administrative experience nor the decisiveness necessary at the Pentagon. He laughed out loud hearing himself described in one profile as "Hamlet, the Prince of Indecision." Congressman John Spratt of South Carolina, Aspin's colleague on the Armed Services Committee, declares this as nonsense. "Les is decisive when the time comes." Now it has arrived. He must assemble a staff, help broker a compromise on gays in the service and defend his Administration's historic downsizing of the world's largest military force...