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Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Hamlet at Shakespeare Tavern
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Hamlet.” Through April 3. The verdict: An inconsistent, much too hammy Hamlet.
Much of the New American Shakespeare Tavern’s “Hamlet” lurches and strains, more farce than profound tragedy. Delicate moments are ruined by playing for laughs, and dramatic tension leaks away.
At the end, though, the company reaches a higher dramatic plane, salvaging the heart-rending denouement of Shakespeare’s most familiar and problematic work.
The problems are typified by Maurice Ralston’s antic and broadly comic performance as Polonius. While the scheming and foolish conveyer of conventional wisdom certainly should be humorous, he should also evoke pathos. But here, so much of the character’s deeper, tragic nature is lost that one of the most chilling, disturbing scenes in English literature — when Hamlet mistakenly stabs the hidden Polonius — brings laughs from the audience.
In the theater’s most demanding role, Matthew Felten as Hamlet comes off more like an amusing, kooky frat boy than a seriously disturbed, threatening, self-tortured character, one of the archetypes of Western culture. His portrayal of Hamlet’s feigned or real madness in the Danish court of Elsinore and his despairing inability to avenge his father’s murder reveal too little of the character’s defining anguish.
Yet, like Hamlet himself, he reaches a deeper level in the final sequence. The high point is the famed “Alas, poor Yorick” speech at the graveyard. Cradling the skull of the long-dead court jester Yorick, a surrogate father for Hamlet in early childhood, Felten shifts from low-voiced, fond introspection to cocky, sardonic musings on death, defining a young man who has cast off boyhood affectations for a new maturity.
Marc McPherson, who resembles the next-door neighbor in a TV sitcom, is miscast as Claudius, the dynamic, evil and conspiratorial king of Denmark. Yet his undeniable acting talent delivers one of the performance’s strongest moments when Claudius cynically and incongruously kneels to pray in an attempt to remove his guilt over murdering his brother, Hamlet’s father. Alone and vulnerable, with Hamlet approaching with drawn sword before again failing to act, McPherson almost makes us pity Claudius, slowly building to the speech’s climax. “O wretched state! O bosom black as death! O limed soul, that struggling to be free, art more engaged!”
Amee Vyas raises the dramatic temperature of the performance with her portrayal of the doomed Ophelia’s madness, more disturbing and convincing than Felten’s effort at Hamlet’s. David Weber as Horatio achieves the full heartbreaking power of the final scene, when, embracing the dying Hamlet, he delivers the famous farewell, “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince.”
The fine closing raises regret that the company that discovered unexpected riches in Shakespeare’s obscure “The Winter’s Tale” could have fallen short with the playwright’s most essential achievement.
“Hamlet.” 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 6:30 p.m. Sundays. $19.50 Thursdays and Sundays; $22.50 Fridays; $24.50 Saturdays. Through April 3. New American Shakespeare Tavern, 499 Peachtree St., Atlanta. 404-874-5299, www .shakespearetavern.com.
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The Michael O’Neal Singers in ‘Elijah’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
The Michael O’Neal Singers. Monday at The Temple on Peachtree St., in Midtown.
Walt Whitman, as a part-time music critic in 1847, heard the first American performance of Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” and pronounced it “too elaborately scientific for the public ear.”
Tuesday evening at The Temple on Peachtree, the Michael O’Neal Singers and several fine vocal soloists delivered an “Elijah” that might have moved the old poet to mend his words.
Similar to Handel’s “Messiah” in structure and form, Mendelssohn’s Biblical oratorio depicts ten scenes from the life of the prophet Elijah, who defended the Israelites’ one God against foreign gods.
And the O’Neal Singers brought it all to glorious life. As a choral trainer, O’Neal has a keen ear for balances and he’s recruited his choir evenly across its sections. At their best, as in the choral number “Cast thy burden upon the Lord,” they sang with a brushed velvety sound.
As a conductor, O’Neal led his 100 singers through a fluent, persuasive performance, of thundering climaxes in the desert sun and tender quiet passages, cool as the shade under an oasis palm. (For Tuesday’s performance, organ and timpani served for the full orchestra. I’d like to hear how O’Neal handles a symphonic band.)
As the title character, bass-baritone John LaForge departed from Mendelssohn’s own description of Elijah — “powerful, zealous, but also harsh and angry and saturine.” LaForge sang a mellower, nicer prophet. He tried to convince us rather than scold, which is certainly more in tune with our culture of self-help spirituality books and Oprah.
The sanctuary’s Sinai-dry humidity levels strained the singer’s throats over the course of the evening. Despite this, the other soloists — tenor Benjamin Pruett sopranos Deborah Benardot and Debbie Rostad, alto Karen Sikorski — sang with a much-appreciated mixture of control and panache.
The evening came together in ideal, three-dimensional splendor from scene no. 6, “Elijah’s desert sojourn,” to the “Final Reflection” The sequence was crisply and movingly sung, a pleasure to hear.
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