I wanted to give this a one-word review, but Broadway Baby reviews can’t contain profanity and I have to do everything I can to make sure nobody wastes their money on this.It’s marketed as 3D – it isn’t. On entry the audience are given a pair of glasses; not the Avatar-watching type, but the ‘90s red-and-blue ones which don’t work. Combining a projector screen with a thrust stage is also a terrible idea, as two thirds of the audience can’t see what’s happening on it. Projection issues needn’t be a huge problem, especially as the 3D bit only lasts for about five minutes – but it is representative of the overall lack of thought in the production.But there is a huge problem with the show, and it lies with the script. I will readily admit that Hamlet is an extremely difficult play to cut well, but there are no excuses for this abject failure. Act V is almost completely gone. Hamlet doesn’t die (!), nor does Claudius or Gertrude – there is no resolution at all. Given the extent to which this play tries to be all the famous bits of Hamlet with nothing in between it’s incredible that they passed on ‘goodnight, sweet prince’.And what has been left behind is bizarrely rearranged. Ophelia’s scene of madness is delivered to Hamlet, which makes a nonsense of their relationship. Hamlet now overhears all sorts of things that confuse his later actions. His soliloquies are all out of order, as if they were interchangeable and unrelated to the rest of the play. To somebody who knows the play well, this is baffling; but to anybody unfamiliar with what’s going on I imagine the it will be rendered utterly unintelligible.The aesthetic is a kind of tawdry American modernity, with suited elders, and hipster youth attached to their mobile phones. Projections of tabloid frontpage splashes related to the plot and arbitrary video clips of moments from the News of the World phone-hacking scandal add nothing but confusion to proceedings. It’s not that a surveillance-culture take on Hamlet is a bad thing to do, as recent National Theatre and RSC productions have proved. However, it makes no sense at all to take this approach to the play while also stripping every political aspect from its scenes - any concern for the state of Denmark (which nobody remarks is rotten) is completely cast aside.The acting isn’t necessarily bad, though Hamlet is prone to quizzical, overemphatic gestures and sometimes came across as having an imperfect grasp of the script. The Hollywood input of Alec Baldwin’s ghost of old Hamlet is largely wasted. The vision proper is reduced to a video message projected from Horatio’s smartphone, and has so many echo effects and distortions applied to it that it may as well be anyone. Though there are some positive points to this production, they are combined in such a way as to cancel each other out, and after that they still have to wrestle with the towering incoherence of the tattered script. Worse than the fact that the show doesn’t have any claim to being 3D, it doesn’t have a claim to the inherited prestige and selling-power of calling itself Hamlet.
