Word: rabbe
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...Broadway HAMLET. Everything about this production of the APA Repertory Company I peculiarly wrong. The costumes are a strange mixture of period and modern; the sense and tempo of the play have been mangled by both Director Ellis Rabb's cuts and his use of the corrupt First Quarto; and Hamlet, played by Mr. Rabb with monotony and weariness, seems in desperate need of geriatric drugs...
...question has often been asked: "What is Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark?" The answer may be found on the stage of Broadway's Lyceum Theater in Ellis Rabb's APA revival. Rabb is the definitive zombie Hamlet, a puppet rather than a mettlesome prince-passionless, prideless and bloodless. So supine is this Hamlet that he lies on the floor of the stage literally for minutes on end, making one wonder if he is in the royal castle at Elsinore or in an opium...
Apart from physical incongruities, the sense and tempo of the play have been mangled both by Rabb's cuts and his use of the corrupt First Quarto. The famous scenes pop to the surface of the play like corks rather than exploding in emotional depth, and Hamlet's upbraiding of Queen Gertrude sounds like a whiny wrangle instead of an anguished son's sexually charged confrontation with his mother...
...soliloquies are delivered as if Hamlet were in desperate need of geriatric drugs. Rabb is too monotonous for eloquence and too weary for anger. The rest of the cast is almost uniformly inept. Horatio is played like a lost Boy Scout, Gertrude as a matronly simp and Ophelia as an epileptic. Only Richard Easton's Claudius has the dignity of a solid stage presence, and Philip Minor's First Gravedigger has wry antic authority. In view of his acting and directing, perhaps Ellis Rabb should really be listed as the First Gravedigger...
...enough to leaven the despair, and what comic spirit there is has been muffled in this Manhattan production by the APA Repertory Company. A 90-minute mood piece on the palpable fear of approaching death, the play has been given a sleepy rather than springy staging by Director Ellis Rabb. Instead of displaying regal authority and a poignant awareness of death, Richard Easton as the king mopes, whines and stumbles about the stage in tattered melancholy, a sort of counterfeit Lear...