Chazare’ Riley

Theatre Appreciation

Dr. Huddleston

25 April 2011

Hamlet

By William Shakespeare

The University of Georgia Theatre’s production of Hamlet by

William Shakespeare was pretty good, and I say “pretty good” because

I understand the length and complexity of the characters, so I take the

difficulty of performing it largely into consideration. Hamlet has a large

cast, so in this production it was common for several actors to have

two and three separate roles. This being the case, actors have to work

extra hard to stand out and make their performance memorable, and I

feel like several performers failed on that wise, and others were

brilliant.

I will begin by praising those that I thought had the best

performance. The title character of Hamlet was played by Brian

Kimmel. For me, he really embodied his role, and that’s what the

method is all about. Witnessing Brian’s descent into insanity as Hamlet

was entertaining. At the same time it made me feel truly sad, and

when a performance makes me emotional, I feel like their job has

been done. I also enjoyed F. Tyler Burnet as Claudius. Even though he

was the bad guy, when it got to the end, I didn’t want him to die.

The characters that I thought were portrayed fairly well were

Gertrude and Polonius. They were played by Chloe Zeitounian and Josh

Ingle respectively. I think my partiality to them is more because they

looked like I imagined their characters to be, so it does not have much

to do with their actual acting.

This leaves all the other actors in the production: Brett

Benowitz, Hannah Broom, Shelli Delgado, Adam Fiddler, Sarah

Halicks, Edward McCreary, Ian Quinlan, Cody Sanders, Nathan

Spring, Harry Valentine, Greg Voyles, and Suzanne Zoller. With

the exception of Shelli Delgado as Ophelia, everyone else’s roles

just blended together to me, and I know it has a lot to do with

them all being cast for two or more roles, but I think that’s when

the methods should be used the most. When playing multiple

characters you have to be refined, and I feel like the production

failed in that area. As for Shelli Delgado, I couldn’t suspend

disbelief enough to get over her child like appearance, so I

couldn’t take her seriously as Ophelia.

This was the first time I was actually familiar with the play I was

going to see, and that really changed my viewing experience. I feel

like it made me a little harsher as a critic because I knew what I

expected to see, and if things were any different then I wasn’t

pleased. Even still, for a three hour production, it was pretty good.