Hamlet

Entering the theater, playgoers are assaulted by deafeningly loud, heavily percussive primitive music. Seated, they look out at a playing area of light brown sand, in which are set large rocks like Druid stones, and up at a canopy of small lights shining against the dark ceiling. Don't get up and leave. This is the People's Light and Theater Company; the play about to begin is Hamlet, and here come the performers. Dressed in costumes of rough cloth, leather and simulated animal skins, they step barefoot on the sand.

Yes, something is rotten in the state of Denmark, but something is also remarkable: Lantern Theater's electrifying production of Hamlet, which opened Tuesday night on a sparse Center City stage that could not seem fuller, and with a cast that could not be finer. William Shakespeare wrote his tragedy almost 410 years ago, but given this smooth, dynamic staging by Lantern's artistic director, Charles McMahon, and this facile interpretation, the Bard could have spun off his longest play while taking a break from bangers and mash just this year.

Shakespeare in the Park works its magic again. The play begins while it's still daylight, and when Marcellus, seeing the ghost of the King, cries out to Horatio, "Look, where it comes again!" everyone turned to look. This is the kind of theatrical illusion that only happens outdoors. A moment of foolish-feeling wonder - nobody's behind us, of course - and Hamlet once again has captured us. This Dane is not melancholy, intellectual or introverted; Michael Stuhlbarg is a wildly excitable, intensely self-infuriated man, full of nervous energy, whose "antic disposition" often seems quite genuinely nuts as he howls and rages and nearly rapes his mother.

The helicopter made several wide sweeps around Chestnut Hill-Mount Airy in the Saturday twilight. Its route took it directly over the campus of Spring Garden College, where opening night of the al fresco Philadelphia Shakespeare in the Park production of "Hamlet" was in progress, the roar of its engine effectively wiping out portions of the Act 1 dialogue. Was this "Hamlet" or was it "Miss Saigon"? In any case, the grandstanding helicopter pilot, thoughtless fellow that he was, was very nearly the only mote I could detect in the eye of this "Hamlet," a skillfully paced and impressively conceived reading.

With its 75th season coming to a close, the Hedgerow Theatre is just now getting around to presenting Hamlet. When the theater was nationally known for its classical repertory, it might have been in a position to mount a more-accomplished initial production of Shakespeare's great tragedy. However, this version, fielding the usual Hedgerow mix of semiprofessional, aspiring and amateur actors, is certainly a competent one. With the well-spoken Paul Kuhn in the title role, this is a Hamlet to listen to closely.

I Hate Hamlet, Paul Rudnick's goofy and often hilarious 1991 fantasy about a young television actor and the ghost of John Barrymore, is such an anachronism in the contemporary theater that it probably should be preserved in formaldehyde and put on display. "One of the last of the boulevard comedies," the accompanying label might say, going on to explain that the boulevard comedy flourished until the mid-' 60s and was characterized by a satiric wit, an efficient symmetry of form, an unapologetic desire to please, and a level of sophistication that tickled the cognoscenti without puzzling the outsider.

HALLSTATT, Austria - It's a scenic jewel, a hamlet of hill-hugging chalets, elegant church spires, and ancient inns all reflected in the deep still waters of an Alpine lake. Hallstatt's beauty has earned it a listing as a UNESCO World Heritage site, but some villagers are less happy about a more recent distinction: plans to copy their hamlet in China. After taking photos and collecting other data on the village while mingling with the tourists, a Chinese firm has started to rebuild much of Hallstatt in faraway Guangdong province, a project that residents here see with mixed emotions.

A fierce version of one of the Bard's great tragedies tops this week's list of new videos. It's joined by a lackluster effort from Woody Allen and a thriller that offers more style than substance. HAMLET 1/2 (1991) (Warner) $92.99. 135 minutes. Mel Gibson is a splendid Hamlet - virile, forceful and filled with more rage than indecision. Director Franco Zeffirelli's cuts will outrage purists, but they reduce the text to its primal essence in this swift-moving reading. An A-list cast of Shakespeare veterans joins, but by no means eclipses, Gibson.

When Tom Stoppard directed the screen version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead five years ago, he didn't simply resurrect the now-classic play that launched his career. He reinvented it. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two minor characters in Hamlet who became Stoppard's major stage work in the '60s. For the film, Stoppard kept the dazzling verbal pyrotechnics but transformed the pair from passive and confused observers into active Everymen who dash around Elsinore in a futile effort to find out what's really going on. The movie plays as a cosmic joke to which there is no punchline.

It wasn't until the crazy Ophelia came on singing "Anything Goes" that I wavered in my approval of what the Arden Theater Company has done to Hamlet. By that time, I was ready for just about anything that the tabloid production in St. Stephen's Alley might throw at me. I really have nothing against pop interpolations in Shakespeare provided they say to a contemporary audience what the playwright himself might have written if he were around now. And Ophelia's mad scene is admittedly one of the more impossibly dippy sequences ever written straight by anyone.

BEAVERTOWN, Pa. - In death, you could say, Monkees singer Davy Jones is on tour again. His funeral was Wednesday in West Palm Beach, Fla. Memorials are planned in Los Angeles, New York City, and his native England. But amid the global fanfare, legions of social-media-savvy fans are flocking to this rural Pennsylvania borough for a modest commemoration. Tiny Beavertown, 160 miles northwest of Philadelphia, is honoring Jones on Saturday with a four-hour event to celebrate his music and pay tribute to a fondly remembered resident.

Once heralded as the greatest British actor of his generation, Nicol Williamson was also a legend for stormy onstage behavior that included calling off a performance of Hamlet mid-speech because he was too tired to go on. "I'll pay for the seats," he later recalled telling the audience in 1969, "but I won't shortchange you by not giving my best. " And then he walked off. He made his name as the faltering attorney in John Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence in the mid-1960s in London, rode the role to a Tony Award nomination on Broadway, and re-created the part in the 1968 film.

HUMMELSTOWN, Pa. - People in Newt Gingrich's hometown got a thrill Dec. 10 when the long-ago little kid, who hunted turtles and played cowboys and Indians at the local rock cavern, mentioned his Pennsylvania roots in a presidential debate. Mayor Brad Miller said that if Gingrich wins the Republican nomination, Hummelstown will invite him to speak at the town's 250th anniversary celebrations in July. "I mean, we'll invite him win, lose, or draw," the mayor corrected himself.

This review of Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival's Hamlet (currently running in repertory with Pride and Prejudice ) comes with an important disclaimer: In this profession, you see an awful lot of pretenders - both worthy and less so - to Denmark's throne. Male, female, prerecorded, live, filmed, boldface-named, de- and then re-reconstructed in German, viewed through his ill-fated peers' limited lens; the maybe-mad prince's message is as difficult to pin down as his father's ghost, though everyone wants to try. PSF's production is the Philadelphia area's third professional effort this season alone, and I'd place it dead center in the continuum: interesting, with its repressive, spare Victorian-meets-institutional design (Steve TenEyck's set features what appears to be a two-tiered prison gate, three carved, upholstered seats, and not much else; Sam Fleming's costumes favor mourning garb)

HALLSTATT, Austria - It's a scenic jewel, a hamlet of hill-hugging chalets, elegant church spires, and ancient inns all reflected in the deep still waters of an Alpine lake. Hallstatt's beauty has earned it a listing as a UNESCO World Heritage site, but some villagers are less happy about a more recent distinction: plans to copy their hamlet in China. After taking photos and collecting other data on the village while mingling with the tourists, a Chinese firm has started to rebuild much of Hallstatt in faraway Guangdong province, a project that residents here see with mixed emotions.

Hamlet's best-known query, "To be or not to be," resonates only if you know who you are - or that you matter - in the first place. In Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , receiving a solid production by Curio Theatre Company, Hamlet's boyhood chums are made interchangeable and expendable, much to their mounting dismay. As Stoppard's first staged success, a hit in the 1966 Edinburgh Fringe Festival (and 1968 Tony Award winner), it's a prelude to many of the themes he later explored in greater detail: philosophy, metaphysics, art, fate.

Play's the thing in Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre's toy-strewn, youthful production of As You Like It , currently running in repertory with Hamlet . In the latter, Mary Tuomanen dons the heaviest pair of man-pants in English theater to decry the world's "unweeded garden. " But here she goes gamine, frolicking in set designer David Gordon's neatly trimmed forest of Arden as Rosalind, expelled from Duke Frederick's court with her cousin Celia (a sweet Victoria Rose Bonito). Of course, Tuomanen still ends up dressed in boy clothes, but only temporarily, and to comic, rather than tragic, effect.

In one of Hamlet 's famous speeches, our Prince of Denmark summons actors and famously tells them to speak "trippingly on the tongue" - then offers a pointer or two. In their "torrent, tempest and . . . whirlwind" of passion, Hamlet says, they must employ "a temperance that may give it smoothness. " In an otherwise nicely edited Hamlet that opened Thursday at the Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre, the tripping-tongue speech is cut, which is bad on two counts: It's iconic, and it's also good advice for this particular production.