SPOLETO BUZZ BLOG

Last Friday, I’d found myself in the American Theater for Tiny Ninja Theatre’s Hamlet. (See Jennifer Corley’s review of TNT also on this blog). I’d seen both of Dov Weinstein’s previous shows, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, at Piccolo in 2002 and ‘03, and so I was quite looking forward to seeing his take on Hamlet. From the get-go, however, I noticed things were different. Instead of gathering intimately around the small table Weinstein has used as a set for previous shows, this audience was sitting in seats as they would for any show in Stars Bar. This Hamlet, it seems, is a cinematic production, not a stage production. Weinstein utilizes a set of very tiny cameras to project images of his action-figure players onto a pair of screens behind him. It’s an interesting idea, and the possibilities it opens up for the show are as vast as the opportunities filmmakers have over stage directors in telling a story. Sometimes, for example, the camera gives us a single character’s point of view (we peep, as Polonius, from behind the arras as Hamlet harangues his mother the Queen and then rushes at us with a sword). But rather than adding to the play, I felt Weinstein’s strategy backfired this time. His camera work was jerky and sometimes out of focus; it often took him a long time to set up a scene for projection; overall, the concept seemed to add yet another layer of difficulty to interpreting the play rather than enhancing its meaning.