Hamlet!

Last week, I went to a free Hamlet staging at the World Financial Center. The uniqueness of this performance was in the fact that the entire building complex of the Financial Center was turned into a stage set: the actors moved around from location to location, and the audience followed. Every ten minutes or so, we'd get up and relocate. Shakespearean quotes reverberated through the steel-concrete-glass spaciousness of the modern hallways, and the costumed actors were superb. If anything, it wasn't easy to keep pace with all the events-watching, listening, drawing, moving around...up the stairs, down the stairs, sitting down, getting up, moving out of the way...This was a very fresh and unusual take on Shakespeare. Besides, nobody had the slightest chance of falling asleep!








Ophelia, going mad, gave me chills...Ginny Myers Lee, the actrees, was so good.




Once again, I was reminded, to my astonishment, just how many phrases that we use today, have roots in Hamlet.

"I must be cruel only to be kind"
"Though this be madness yet there is method in it"
"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark"
"And each particular hair to stand on end"
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"

"When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions."

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"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though, by your smiling, you seem to say so."