Richard Width and Kelly Collins-Lintz

By Paul Rudnick
Directed by Thomas Ouellette
Performed in the Margeson Theater (300 Seats)

Soap star Andrew Rally's life is in turmoil even though he has landed the lead in Hamlet. He HATES the play with a passion. But the swashbuckling ghost of John Barrymore, called up from a seance, takes him as a reluctant protege and gives him a new outlook on life. "Fast, funny... unapologetically silly... hilarious..." NY Times

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REVIEWS

I Hate Hamlet, But You'll Love the Hams!

The Orlando Weekly
By Al Krulick
Published 1/24/02

Pure love (below): Andrew (Width) is beguiled by flighty but chaste Deirdre (Collins-Lintz)

Thomas Ouellette, the director of Paul Rudnick's delightfully droll comedy about theatrical life, "I Hate Hamlet," now in production by the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival, leaves little doubt about where he wants to take his audience, right from the start.

The show's wild ride, with its hilariously clashing views of life and art, begins in the dark. First, we hear a few bars of menacing film noir background music. Then, a quick segue into some pulsing techno-rock, and finally the ominous strains of a vintage stage pipe-organ fill the house. Thus, we are primed for an exhilarating journey, where any semblance of normal reality happily falls victim to the caprices of the theatrical muse.

When the lights do come up, playwright Rudnick ("Jeffrey," "The Naked Eye") also wastes little time launching into the play's improbable plot -- one that is peopled with a company of richly idiosyncratic characters, not the least of which is the ghost of long-dead John Barrymore (Carl Wallnau), the fabled American actor, carouser and womanizer, whose larger-than-life portrayals of Shakespearean characters led him to be known as the greatest Hamlet of his generation.

Wishing to emulate Barrymore's stage triumph is a terribly conflicted modern-day Hollywood star, Andrew Rally (Richard Width.) Andrew thinks that he just might have a go at the greatest role in the English language, mostly because his weekly TV series has hit the doldrums, and his commercial repertoire of talking to hand puppets while touting foul-tasting snack treats has not provided him with the great artistic rewards he once envisioned for himself.

But Andrew is tortured by his lack of self-confidence and the knowledge that he just might not have the chops to live up to his idol's famed ability. When prompted by his flighty girlfriend, Deirdre (Kelly Collins-Lintz), as well as the ditzy real-estate agent who has rented him Barrymore's former New York apartment (Suzanne O'Donnell) and his stern, German-accented agent (Mary Baird), to call upon the ghost of the one known as "the great profile" to help him in his preparations, Andrew demurs. He decides that he actually hates Shakespeare and would rather go back to Los Angeles, where he can be famous -- even if perpetually mediocre -- for the rest of his professional life.

Of course, it's all too late for that when Barrymore's ghost actually does appear -- in all his black-caped, cod-pieced and leg-tighted glory -- to tutor Andrew into becoming the greatest Hamlet of his own generation. Teacher and pupil go at it, trading diatribes of what constitutes great performing, how one needs to prepare for a role and what sacrifices are necessary in order to create first-rate art for the ages.

Woven through the broad hilarity of the play's action are Rudnick's dead-on perceptions about the theater world's denizens -- from Barrymore to the modern-day Hollywood sharpie, personified by Andrew's friend and colleague, writer/producer/director Gary Lefkowitz (Eric Hissom). The "WPD" keeps trying to persuade Andrew to forget about all this "Hamlet" nonsense ("Shakespeare -- it's like ... algebra on stage!") and return to L.A. for a new TV series about a teacher -- who becomes a superhero at after dark!

Suffice to say, all the performances in the show are vivacious, funny and appealing. Especially enjoyable is Collins-Lintz as Andrew's giddy love interest, Deirdre. Watch-ing her carom about the stage, exaggerating her movements and gestures like some hyperkinetic marionette, radiating optimism and cheer, one is amazed by her ability to make such a frivolous character, sympathetic and real.

But the evening belongs to Width for his uproarious portrayal of Andrew and, of course, to Wallnau, whose Barrymore ranges from petty and self-pitying to absolutely magisterial. It is a performance of immense dexterity and feeling: humorous, grandiose, technically consummate and artfully conveyed. If the ghost of "the great profile" is indeed watching, he would be extremely pleased ... and then, of course, he'd go out for a round of drinks.

Laughs come easily in festival's frothy, frolicsome comedy!

By Elizabeth Maupin
Orlando Sentinel Theater Critic
Posted January 22, 2002

Gary Peter Lefkowitz is everybody's nightmare vision of a Hollywood producer - gold neck chain, sunglasses, multiple rings flashing in the light. Gary doesn't see the point of theater, and when his best friend is set to play Hamlet in Central Park, Gary flies in from the coast to make him a better offer.

"TV," he says. "It's like art perfected. When you watch TV, you can eat."

Gary Peter Lefkowitz, a supporting player in the comedy I Hate Hamlet, is a trip in anybody's book. But in the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival's telling, he's got a little something extra. Gary is played by Eric Hissom, most recently Petruchio in the festival's Taming of the Shrew and not long before that the title character in Macbeth. To see someone so well-versed in Shakespeare play Gary Peter Lefkowitz - and play him to the hilt - gives this show a layer of mischief nobody expects.

There's plenty of mischief already in I Hate Hamlet, an absurd little comedy that the Shakespeare festival has blown up to proportions of epic silliness. This is a show where everyone adds to the merriment, from the six accomplished actors to the composer who contributed a jingle for a fictitious snack called Trailburst Nuggets and the costume designer whose confections must be seen to be believed. And director Thomas Ouellette, a faculty member at Rollins College, has brought it all together so that the show looks effortless -- an airy buffoonery that makes grown men snort.

Playwright Paul Rudnick, a comedy writer known as much for his movie scripts (Addams Family Values, In & Out) as his theater work, drew on his own experience with I Hate Hamlet, which takes place in a Greenwich Village apartment that once belonged to John Barrymore, the greatest Hamlet of his generation.

The playwright once lived in this Gothic-styled apartment, and his conceit is that, when a young TV star named Andrew Rally moves in, the ghost of Barrymore returns to help him out. Andrew has been hired to play the gloomy prince in Central Park, but he's going into the role kicking and screaming. He hates Hamlet, he says; he'd rather be in California, and it doesn't help that his girlfriend Deidre is a determined virgin at 29.

Rudnick is an able jokester, and he has thrown together a grab bag of mismatched types - the callow young actor, his ethereal girlfriend, a Teutonic old agent, a gushing Noo Yawk real estate saleswoman, the Hollywood producer and the grand old Barrymore himself, a matinee idol whose matinee has long since gone dark.

Still, the delights in this show are in what the festival has done with it. Rebecca Baygents has designed clothes that almost precede their wearers into the room: the Shakespearean costume for Deidre (Kelly Collins-Lintz) with Bjork-inspired three-dimensional doves all over it, the party dress for the real-estate agent Felicia (Suzanne O'Donnell) that looks like Christian Lacroix on speed.

O'Donnell, in a welcome return to the festival stage, is a stitch as the imbecilic Felicia: "Is it the real Hamlet or, like, the musical?" she asks. And Collins-Lintz, who also wrote the Trailburst Nuggets jingle, gives the earnest acting-student Deidre such elaborately literal gestures that she seems to perform in American Sign Language: She's Ophelia crossed with a drum majorette.

Richard Width makes a nicely callow Andrew, who flails against the indignities of his brief Hollywood career but trembles before the prospect of changing it, and Mary Baird avoids the sentiment in the aging Lillian, Andrew's German-accented agent. (Why Lillian is German is just one of the loose ends in Rudnick's sometimes careless script, which also may leave you wondering why actors get into costume in Greenwich Village for a show they're doing in Central Park.)

Hissom pretty much stops the show with Hollywood Gary, a blithe, monomaniacal type with a fervent belief in the lowest common denominator. And Carl Wallnau, a New Jersey-based actor making his first appearance with the festival, makes a lovely old Barrymore, here more of a Clark Gable lookalike but with the great hollow tones of 1930s Hollywood, the well-oiled manner of the pleasantly drunk character at a cocktail party and the self-mockery of a born comedian.

Rudnick is both a sentimentalist and, after all, a theater writer, and I Hate Hamlet has a soft heart underneath all the mockery. It's a tribute to the Barrymores of the world - and if it gets you to Hamlet, the Shakespeare festival's next offering, that may well be part of the plan.

Hating Hamlet may be well and good. But loving Hamlet makes I Hate Hamlet all the better.

                                                                 Last Updated: 05/06/2007                    Copyright Orlando Shakespeare Theater