Audio By Carbonatix
Mocking sacred cows is a venerable tradition in the arts, and as long as it’s done without any discernible taste (but with a good deal of wit), it satisfies our sense of the ridiculous without betraying original works. Remember Richard Armour’s Twisted Tales From Shakespeare? Like that perverse piece of parody, Hamlet, Cha Cha Cha!, at Germinal Stage Denver, is all good, clean, tasteless fun.
Playwright Monk Ferris understands how seriously the Melancholy Dane takes himself and how absurd his ancient plight may look from the standpoint of contemporary mores. And we wouldn’t laugh if we hadn’t secretly harbored our own minor qualms about Hamlet’s self-importance and self-absorption.
In Shakespeare’s original story, Prince Hamlet is disgusted with his mother, Gertrude, for marrying his Uncle Claudius a few weeks after his father’s violent death. Visited by his father’s ghost and instructed to seek revenge against his murderer, Hamlet eventually figures out that Claudius is the villain of the piece. Meanwhile, the prince’s inability to function leads to all kinds of suffering. In the end, Gertrude, Claudius, Hamlet, his girlfriend, Ophelia, her brother Laertes and their father, Polonius, are all dead, along with a couple of characters everyone always mixes up–Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Shakespeare’s tale might have been a really silly story if it hadn’t been so brilliant. But that’s just what Ferris extracts–the surface silliness. His dialogue is a mishmash of contemporary vernacular and phrases from Hamlet and other Shakespearean plays. He changes Ophelia from a sweet little pushover into a brash broad overfond of the delights of the table. Danine Schell as brassy, nasal Ophelia irritates at first; but the grating on your nerve endings becomes amusing once you get what she’s up to. In Ferris’s version, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are gay lovers and Laertes is just plain dopey. Todd Black and Eric Stephenson make Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a little lost, even pathetic, in their boyish befuddlement. Roy A. Reents, a treat to watch, mocks Laertes’s dignity with ease and style.
There are three great soliloquies in the original play–famed pieces of oratory that Ferris’s Hamlet keeps trying to deliver but can’t because he’s never left alone long enough. Handsome young Brad George picks just the right tone for his title character–a little vague about what’s going on, mildly ticked off and basically absurd.
Director/designer Ed Baierlein plays Claudius as a rakish sociopath–sarcastic, cunning, but not all that bright. Carol Elliott is his lovely Gertrude, and the two do a wild “Boo Hoo, I Do” number together that parodies the swift royal marriage.
The music, naturally, is all pretty goofy, but somehow I found it more pleasant than many of the refined musicals I’ve seen in recent years. And the tuneful comic songs do a good job of summing up the plot as it unfurls. “Boo Hoo” lets us know how Claudius and Gertrude feel about the poor old dead king; “The R&G (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) Rag” shows how confused the guys feel about what’s going on; “Nice Advice” ridicules the famous advice Polonius gives Laertes (“To thine own self be true”); and “Get Thee to a Nunnery” mocks Hamlet’s famous assault on poor little Ophelia. Two of the best numbers are “Let’s Get Him,” in which Claudius and Laertes plot to kill Hamlet, and “Yuck, It’s Yorick” in which Hamlet discovers the skull of the old court jester and ponders mortality.
The songs work so well partly because Baierlein’s comic timing is so sharp and partly because the Germinal’s intimate stage puts them right in your face. Baierlein’s secret as a director is to draw us in and then lean on the audience’s energy for sustenance. What results is not too nutritious, maybe, but delicious just the same.