Pocket Play Review: Hamlet at the Nevada 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: Nevada Shakespeare Festival
• The Stage: Inside a bigtop tent at Cornerstone Park in Henderson, Nevada
• Run Dates: May 8–17, 2025
• Memorable for: The wedding reception line dance, whose joyous energy gives stark contrast to Hamlet’s grief.
• The Most Creative Use of a Zipline Award goes to Roxy Mojica for her memorable set design.

Pocket Play Review: This was my second Hamlet in two weeks. In many ways, the two productions could not have been more different.

In April, I saw the show on a big, indoor stage at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. The royal court dressed in tuxedos and ball gowns to inhabit a set draped in 1920s lux.

In the Nevada Shakespeare Festival’s production, the action begins on the dirt-floored courtyard of a trailer park, where a good-looking guy in a black Stetson and a blond gal sporting a gold duster coat are hosting their wedding reception.

Country music pours through the speakers, sparking a celebratory line dance. A saucy young woman tries to pull a man dressed in black onto the dance floor. But he has something on his mind, and in the next two and a half hours, we’ll follow this tormented guy to his inevitable doom.

You might wonder, “Is this Hamlet?” Yes, absolutely. Nevada Shakes’s mission is to “bring the power and purpose of Shakespeare to the modern world through bold and engaging concepts.” By setting the play in a trailer park, they help us focus our attention on the family drama at the show’s heart.

We see the love and lust in Claudius (Christopher Brown) every time he looks at Gertrude (Monica Johns). Hamlet’s repulsion when they fondle each other is enough to make a person lose his mind. Brandon Alan McClenahan as Hamlet is a strong man made weak by grief, whose slide into madness feels honest and inevitable.

I’ll make one more comparison between these two Hamlet productions. In Alabama, deep cuts to the text shortened the performance time to under two hours. In Nevada, the cuts were less extensive, so the runtime was closer to two and a half hours. Overall, I would say the Alabama production looked more traditional but was actually less so because more than half the text had disappeared. This Nevada team wraps Shakespeare’s story in a creative package, but remains sweetly faithful to the original. If only Gertrude had stayed as true.

In sum: The Nevada Shakespeare Festival wraps the Bard’s greatest play in a wildly creative package but stays sweetly faithful to the family drama at the story’s heart.

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