Pocket Play Review: Hamlet at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival

Author Julie Hammonds is on a quest to complete Shakespeare’s canon in calendar year 2025. In these pocket play reviews, she records brief impressions of each show she sees.

• The Play: Hamlet
• The Company: Alabama Shakespeare Festival
• The Stage: the Festival Stage, the larger of two stages in the Carolyn Blount Theatre, a performing arts complex in Montgomery, Alabama
• Run Dates: April 17 through May 4, 2025
• Memorable for: Ophelia’s journey into madness, portrayed with aching sadness by Jihan Haddad
• The Margaret Graham Award for earning audience adoration with decades of devotion to your craft goes to Greta Lambert as Polonius

Pocket Play Review: The Alabama Shakespeare Festival heard some pushback when early marketing efforts for this production of Hamlet described it as an adaptation.

But any production of Hamlet is an adaptation. Text sources vary, which means choices must always be made. A production of the full text would run longer than four hours. Almost all stage productions use cut-down texts. This one was cut by roughly half.

The tight edits lend the show urgency. In this Danish court, events unfold with the power of a flooding river. Driven to respond, Grant Chapman’s Hamlet is not indecisive; he’s athletic, darting around the multi-level stage as he speaks.

Those around him, confused by his “antic disposition,” must also think on their feet as they try to contain the damage he causes. This forceful production lifts the audience into the lifeboats and urges us to hang on for the ride.

In sum: Significant cuts to the text lend this “Hamlet” the force and urgency of a flooding river, lifting the audience into the lifeboats and urging us to hang on for the ride.

***

When I first came to Alabama in 1987, I was in my twenties. That year, I saw The Tempest and The Taming of the Shrew. Because I keep everything, I still have the playbills.

After seeing Hamlet this past weekend, I hoped to give Grant Chapman a copy of Blue Mountain Rose. A book in which someone learns to play Hamlet seems like a nice stage-door gift for an actor playing Hamlet, don’t you think?

It turned out that Grant had already left the building, but as I waited with stage manager Emilee Buchheit, I showed her my playbills. Emilee pointed out that one of the actors I’d just seen, Greta Lambert, was also in the plays I saw back then.

In Hamlet, Lambert plays the elder courtier Polonius with grace and range. The scene in which Polonius offers advice to her son Laertes as her daughter Ophelia listens is touchingly done. We are watching an affectionate parent, reluctant to part from a beloved child.

In 1987, Lambert portrayed Prospero’s teenage daughter Miranda and the shrewd Katherina, leading roles for a talented actor early in her career. That same actor is now a beloved icon of the Shakespearean stage.

According to ASF, Lambert has played every one of Shakespeare’s major female roles (and some that are more frequently played by men). In fact, “Audiences last saw her commanding the stage as Prospero in our 2023 production of The Tempest.”

Isn’t that magical? Only repertory festivals like those in Montgomery and Ashland and (in my fiction) the Blue Mountain Rose let the audience experience a wonderful actor like Lambert as she moves from Miranda to Prospero over the course of a long career.

[photo credit: Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Greta Lambert (left) plays Polonius and Jihan Haddad plays Ophelia in ASF’s 2025 production of Hamlet.]