The Playgoer: REVIEW: Ian Hill's Hamlet (Village Voice)

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Thursday, June 28, 2007

REVIEW: Ian Hill's Hamlet (Village Voice)

I wished I had liked Ian W. Hill's Hamlet (at the Brick's Pretentious Fest) better, Hill being a blogger and all. But the Voice pays me for my objective opinion.

As someone who once directed a bad Hamlet myself, I can appreciate the passion and sweat that goes into such a grand venture. Attempting to realize Hamlet onstage is almost always, I imagine, a matter of measuring the gap between the idea and the reality.

This actually appeared in print last week, but the vv-dot-com's theatre page has been way slow on the uptake lately. I have a review out this week, too, but it's not even online yet.

(It's of "Fall Forward," a nice little site-specific piece at an old church in the financial district. It's free and worth an hour if you're down there. Closing Saturday. Info here.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

GE,

Thanks for the kindness as far as at least wishing you'd liked the show better. I'm sorry I didn't pull this off for you.

And thank you very much for coming to the show and reviewing it -- I always have to mention this every time I write one of these to someone for the first time (as I also did for James Comtois for his nytheatre.com review, and on my blog) -- one of the few bits of personal advice that Richard Foreman gave me when I was producing the festivals of his work was to ALWAYS write a thank-you note to EVERYONE who comes to review them, whether they liked the show or not (I've wondered ever since how he dealt with John Simon for years and years in his notes). I pass that on to everyone else as extremely good advice, believe me.

And frankly, I always can, and with absolute sincerity, thank my reviewers. I'm thankful anyone comes to see my shows at all, let alone thinks or writes about them for any length of time. I hope it's okay to thank you here, but I don't have your email handy (I must have it SOMEWHERE, but whatever).

I can go on and on about how maybe if you saw it on a different, less-rocky, night it might have been different, but then again, it might not have. In any case, we were open to the paying public on that rocky opening night, and if we were open for paying customers, we should be open to being judged by what we put up that night.

Again, thank you for coming, wish it had gone better for you (and me), and best to you and all in your world,

IWH