Review: "Hamlet Speak" Digs Deeper Into a Rotten Denmark
Hamlet Speak Adapted and directed by Kathy Curtiss Presented by Renaissance Now Theatre & Film at the Chain Theatre 312 West 36th Street, 4th floor, Manhattan, NYC July 26-29, 2023 Joshua Johnson as Horatio and Austin Zimmerman as Hamlet. Behind: The Players. Photo by Jonathan Slaff. If there is a better way to begin a production of Hamlet than with the music of German band Rammstein, we haven't seen it yet. Rammstein's industrial-infused hard rock plays over projected images and video of war across the ages to begin Hamlet Speak , a new version of Shakespeare's Hamlet , freely adapted and directed by Renaissance Now Theatre & Film's Artistic Director Kathy Curtiss, which includes short monologues in a contemporary voice from Hamlet and Ophelia. Curtiss, who took a similar, and similarly successful, approach to the Scottish play in last year's Macbeth Redux (read our review here ), adds often confessional, sometimes metatheatrical commentary, which, partic...