‘Fats Ham’ Broadway evaluate: Yard BBQ ‘Hamlet’ wants extra meat

Is Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” the perfect car for contemporary questions on race, masculinity and LGBT points? — that is the query.

Playwright James Ijames’ “Fat Ham,” which opened Wednesday evening on Broadway, thinks so. Extra characters come out of the closet — or get excessive — on this zany spin on the tragedy than violently perish. 

The play contorts “Hamlet” right into a broad dysfunctional household comedy, because it strikes the often anguished motion to a vigorous yard BBQ someplace down south.

Carried out with Denmark, now one thing’s rotten within the state of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland or Tennessee — we’re undecided which.

That could be a superb, if not groundbreaking, thought. Shakespeare’s performs are tailored and relocated on a regular basis — the 1999 film “10 Issues I Hate About You” is predicated on “The Taming of the Shrew,” whereas “The Lion King” is “Hamlet” with hyenas. 

And two years in the past, “Fats Ham” director Saheem Ali directed a humorous, Harlem-set “Merry Wives of Windsor” in Central Park.

Nevertheless, though our Hamlet stand-in, Juicy (Marcel Spears), nonetheless desires to avenge the dying of his father who was murdered by his villainous uncle, he’s far more involved along with his private identification — that’s, homosexual and delicate in a conventional black household. 

Don’t get me fallacious. Hamlet has all the time been a deeply self-involved man, however as initially written there’s hearth behind his narcissism. The prince needed to show the reality of an unspeakable royal crime, not the much less compelling reality of his sexual preferences.

By comparability, the stakes right here, to place it in BBQ parlance, are low and gradual. As an alternative of “O, that this too too stable flesh would soften,” Juicy tells us, “I requested my mom for a doll. A black Barbie wearing pink.” 

Throughout one other pseudo-soliloquy, he wails the Radiohead tune “Creep” on a karaoke machine, whereas these round him jerk round in a dreamy interpretive dance.  

And on the foolish, superfluous finish of the play, we neither mourn nor recuperate from the exhilaration of a lethal conflict. As an alternative, the characters fortunately dance to pulsing pop as a result of they’re nearer to accepting who they are surely. 

Good for them. The difficulty is, once you rip out the tragedy and, for probably the most half, the principle character’s propulsive rage and manufactured insanity, you’re left with a moderately aimless story that leaves its viewers feeling hungry for some meat. And empty carbs — the first rate humor and overwrought poetry — are usually not sufficient to fill the void.

Juicy, who attends the College of Phoenix on-line (one of many present’s higher jokes), is joined on the occasion by his uncle Rev (Billy Eugene Jones), who secretly had his father Pap (additionally Jones, as his ghost) killed whereas he was in jail. Rev then begins getting cozy with Juicy’s outlandish mother Tedra (Nikki Crawford, Gertrude by means of “Actual Housewives”), miserable Juicy. 

His greatest buddy Tio (Chris Herbie Holland) can be there for the feast, together with gal pal Opal (Adrianna Mitchell), her repressed marine brother Larry (Calvin Leon Smith) and their hilarious mother Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas). In descending order: Horatio, Ophelia, Laertes and Polonius. 

For some time there’s some satisfaction in experiencing the methods Ijames inventively reconceives Shakespearean plot factors and characters.

And, on the design entrance, it’s intelligent to switch the same old Danish fog with smoke from a BBQ pit on Maruti Evans’ set.

But you begin to get the sense that extra effort was spent on meticulously organising the pins than lastly knocking them down. The ending is mush.

Nonetheless, the forged’s vitality is heat and enveloping all through. Spears’ Juicy, along with his sideways glances and Charlie Brown sincerity, is extra lovable than any melancholy Hamlet you’ll ever see.

Jones doesn’t come throughout evil sufficient to kill anyone, however he’s a font of mischievous vitality.

And Holland has a kooky speech late within the play that’s a pleasure to observe and listen to, if disconnected from every thing else.

That’s the factor. A lot of Ijames’ “Fats Ham” is playful concepts that don’t add up. Karaoke and dance events are fabulous, however as an alternative of smoke and mirrors, give us some slings and arrows.