ajhlovestheatre

FAT HAM

by James Ijames

Directed by Saheem Ali

American Airlines Theatre New York City – booking to 25 June 2023

https://www.fathambroadway.com

Hamlet takes time out of his melancholic schedule to express his ongoing discontentment by performing a roof-raising karaoke version of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ while Gertrude serenades her volatile new husband with an eye-poppingly suggestive rendition of the Crystal Waters dancefloor classic ‘100% Pure Love’… I mean, sure, why not?! You might have thought that Hamlet is the last of Shakespeare’s plays that could bear a high camp, high energy treatment (I mean, even Lear has a Fool), but you’d have thought wrong.

The bard’s most popular tragedy gets a modern Black American makeover in James Ijames’s rambunctious, Pulitzer-winning piece, newly arrived on Broadway following a critically acclaimed sell out season at the Public Theater downtown, and it proves a life-enhancing addition to the season. It may be more spangles than subtlety, and uses a number of well-worn tropes to hit the comedy home, but it undoubtedly compounds it’s clichés with aplomb and a vitiating showbiz flair, and you are pretty much guaranteed to leave the theatre feeling a hell of a lot better than you did when you went in.

Ijames has transplanted Hamlet to an unspecified Southern state (“not Mississippi, or Alabama or Florida” as the Playbill and published script assure us) and the Danish royals are now a squabbling family looking to possibly sell their barbecue restaurant to alleviate their financial woes, and Elsinore is their back porch. Central to the success of Saheem Ali‘s brash, delightful production is a star-making performance by Marcel Spears as Juicy, the likeable, thicc, damaged queer college student at the heart of Ijames’s loquacious, go-for-broke script.

Spears has a magnetic, witty but sincere stage presence and understated comedy timing that proves irresistible. Crucially, as a troubled young man trying to find the strength in his own softness and struggling to break the family cycle of macho bullshit and bullying, he’s the human bridge between the audience and the frequently wild characters and goings-on elsewhere in the play. However crazy it all gets (and it does get pretty crazy), Spears, clad in a sparkly T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Momma’s Boy”, gives us a central figure to really root for and relate to. He has a way with Ijames’s salty, joyfully bonkers language, especially the wry, askance asides, that almost makes it sound like he’s improvising on the spot. When he tackles actual Shakespeare (or “that dead old white man” as he’s described by one of the characters), such as the famed “what a piece of work is man” speech, it’s a thing of real beauty; he owns it to such an extent that one longs to see him play the original role in full in the near future. This is an irresistible Broadway debut.

If Spears is working on a palpably different energy level to the rest of the company, that feels like a measured choice to demonstrate Juicy’s “otherness”. One of the joys (and there are many) of Ali’s staging is that, in spite of this, all of the characters seem to be inhabiting the same warped, colourful universe, and each of the actors achieve a similar state of blissful, caffeinated energy. Perhaps the most successful is Nikki Crawford, doing utterly gorgeous work – wildly funny but with undertows of tenderness and deep unease as Tedra – Fat Ham’s ‘Gertrude’ equivalent. The newly widowed Queen of Denmark is reimagined here as an ebullient, gleaming, undulating glamazon (“I need noise. Commotion makes me happy”), of whom Crawford makes you believe that underneath all the bling, make-up and flagrant sexuality, here is a woman who genuinely adores her son but finds herself caught between a rock and a hard place.

An unexpected bonus of Ijames’s writing is that he actually gives Tedra more agency, or at least more justification for her actions, than Shakespeare afforded Gertrude. When Juicy quizzes her as to whether she misses his father (depicted as a far more savage figure here than anything envisioned for Hamlet), she responds that “my memory of him won’t allow me to miss him….if you think about something everyday…you not really remembering it. It’s just there. Like heartburn.” She further notes “I went from my Daddy’s house to my husband’s house. I ain’t never been alone.” Her behaviour is sometimes crass but it is fundamentally understandable and, in Crawford’s barnstorming performance, she’s hard and sassy, then she’s soft and conflicted, but she’s seldom less than lovable.

The other women are terrific too: Ophelia becomes feisty, gay Opal (Adrianna Mitchell, seething in a sparkly frock, screamingly funny but also multi-layered…she’s not messing around when Juicy asks her if, as queer kids, they can survive the tough road ahead: “I will. I’m not sure about you.”) Benja K Thomas comes close to stealing the show as the somewhat clichéd God-fearing grande dame. If the revelation concerning her past doesn’t fully convince, it’s an undoubted crowd pleaser, like so much else about this show.

Billy Eugene Jones brings manic glee but also a chilling unpredictability to the dual role of both of Tedra’s husbands (unlike in Shakespeare, this Ghost has plenty to say for himself). Chris Herbie Holland is a glorious comic find as Juicy’s sex-mad, pot-loving, endlessly inappropriate cousin/sidekick, and he gets a monologue near the end that brings the house down, delivered with exactly the right combination of roguish charm and wired mania. Calvin Leon Smith completes the cast as Opal’s button-up military brother, and if he initially appears to have the most thankless role while everyone else is firing on all cylinders, well, just you wait. Smith turns out to be a shape-shifting sensation…

Ijames has a tremendous gift for heightened dialogue rooted in real life, and a beguiling grip on theatricality, which Ali’s production embraces and exploits. However, the show could safely lose around fifteen minutes running time: there is a point about three quarters of the way through where tension and interest flag. If ultimately neither the staging nor the script, for all their snap and pop, makes us truly believe that Juicy is on the verge of killing his horrible stepdad/uncle, there is still plenty here to relish.

Maruti Evans’s house-porch set is fascinating, looking realistic at first, but becoming more and more artificial the longer you scrutinise it, and appears a useful metaphor for Fat Ham’s relationship to Hamlet, but then undergoes a stunning (and, one would imagine, costly) transformation which has to be seen to be believed. Dominique Fawn Hill’s costumes and Brad King’s lighting are equally vivid and ingenious. Skylar Fox’s illusions add a layer of authentic magic. The crowd pleasing ending is the stuff theatregoers memories are made of, so much so that it seems a little churlish to point out that it feels more like the writer wasn’t quite sure how to end the play rather than a natural or credible conclusion to what we’ve watched. It’s pretty wonderful as a theatrical moment though.

Less confrontational and easier to follow than Jordan Cooper’s underrated Ain’t No Mo from earlier this season or Michael R Jackson’s masterpiece A Strange Loop from the last, and a better piece than Douglas Lyons’s Chicken And Biscuits, Fat Ham, despite its faults, feels like a Black American play that could, and should, succeed on Broadway. It’s intelligent, warm, wild, and a rollicking good time in the theatre. No, it’s not perfect, but this cast sell it for everything it’s worth, and then some. Adorable.