NEW YORK, NY.- Winter has just begun in New York, but already the Public Theater is looking toward summer: The nonprofit announced Thursday that in June it would begin presenting an extended run of Shakespeares great tragedy Hamlet in Central Park.
The production, which will be the fifth Hamlet in the 61 years of Free Shakespeare in the Park, will star Ato Blankson-Wood, a 38-year-old actor who was a member of the ensemble in a production of Hair in the park in 2008, and who has since starred there in musical adaptations of Twelfth Night and As You Like It. In 2020, Blankson-Wood was nominated for a Tony Award for Slave Play.
Kenny Leon, a much-in-demand director who this season directed revivals of Topdog/Underdog and Ohio State Murders on Broadway, will helm the production, returning to the park after winning plaudits for his direction of Much Ado About Nothing during the summer of 2019.
Hamlet will be the only show in the park this summer a reduction from the usual two-show schedule prompted by plans to renovate the Delacorte Theater, the open-air amphitheater where Free Shakespeare in the Park takes place. Hamlet will run for nine weeks, from June 8 to Aug. 6, after which the major renovation work is expected to begin; this winter, work in some ancillary areas is already underway.
The Publics artistic director, Oskar Eustis, said he had been so impressed by Leons work on Much Ado that he asked him to pick a play he wanted to do next, and they settled on Hamlet. Its the greatest play ever written, Eustis said, so lets give him a crack at Everest.
Eustis also said he had high hopes for Blankson-Wood. Hes a gorgeously charismatic performer, and the complexity of his inner life, and his ability to connect with an audience, is going to make him an extraordinary Hamlet, he said. (Blankson-Wood has a background in musical theater, and the credits for this Hamlet include music composition by Jason Michael Webb. I suspect his beautiful singing voice will not be completely wasted, Eustis said of Blankson-Wood.)
Eustis said that the production would have a contemporary feel, but that the exact time and place where it will be set have not yet been determined. He said the cast would be diverse, but that it was absolutely meaningful to Kenny and to me that our Hamlet is a young Black man who is torn between ideals of revenge and violence and ideals of forgiveness and understanding and even rationality, and in the pairing between those things is finding himself paralyzed.
Eustis said his thinking about Hamlet had been influenced by Fat Ham, the most recent Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, which is a riff on the Shakespeare play set in the American South, and which will be running on Broadway this spring, produced in part by the Public. Im sure hoping that were going to be running Fat Ham and Hamlet at the same time, Eustis said, because those two plays talk to each other in a most beautiful way.
In pre-pandemic years, the Shakespeare in the Park season was followed by a short-run Public Works production, usually on or around Labor Day weekend, which was a musical adaptation of a classic story employing a mix of professional and amateur actors. The last new Public Works production there was Hercules, in 2019, but Eustis said there were three in development. He said he expected there would be a Public Works production staged this summer, although he did not yet know when or where it would take place.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.