Entertainment

Michael Urie Puts the Madcap in Hamlet’s Madness

WASHINGTON — If we can have drama queens, then surely there’s a place for drama princes in those nosebleed heights occupied by the emotionally excessive. As the unhinged title character of “Hamlet,” at the Harman Center for the Arts here, Michael Urie seems not so much mad as madcap, with eccentrically extravagant gestures that Auntie Mame might envy.

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BEN BRANTLEY
, New York Times

WASHINGTON — If we can have drama queens, then surely there’s a place for drama princes in those nosebleed heights occupied by the emotionally excessive. As the unhinged title character of “Hamlet,” at the Harman Center for the Arts here, Michael Urie seems not so much mad as madcap, with eccentrically extravagant gestures that Auntie Mame might envy.

It was only a month ago that Urie, one of the most inspired comic stage actors working these days, completed his triumphant run as the heroically flamboyant drag queen of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song,” at the Second Stage in New York. Purple vestiges of that performance cling to his interpretation of the avenging Prince of Denmark for the Shakespeare Theater Co. in the production that opened Monday night.

Like his Arnold Beckoff in “Torch Song,” Urie’s Hamlet is often histrionic to the point of hysteria and sardonic in a way that lets us know that, yes, he’s aware he’s overdoing it a bit, but wouldn’t you if you were surrounded by such meshugas? His behavior is that of a sensitive, gifted lad who’s used to being the smartest boy in the kingdom, which also makes him its most misunderstood.

Throughout Michael Kahn’s aggressively contemporary production, which suggests a fascist state custom-styled and branded by a haute fashion house, this Hamlet is always scoring points off the dimmer minds that surround him.

When devising a theatrical scheme to out his father’s murderer, and describing the power a drama can have upon “guilty people sitting at a play,” he casts a hairy eyeball upon the audience. He knows we’re out there, us little people in the dark, festering with our own dirty secrets.

That moment might be more effective if it chilled us. Instead, we’re charmed. By now we’re accustomed to this Puckish lad looking out at us with his can-you-believe-this gaze when his friends and family behave as stupidly as he predicted they would.

That’s our Hamlet. What a cutup! Even when he pulls a pistol out of his chicly oversize cardigan, paired with skinnier-than-thou jeans (Jess Goldstein did the trendy costumes), and talks of being or not being, it’s hard to think of him as a threat — to himself or to anyone else.

I greatly admire Urie, whose smart, calculatingly silly performances in both “Torch Song” and “The Government Inspector” were theater high points last year. And I’d love to be able to say that there’s sly, subversive method in his madcappery here. But if there is, he’s not sharing it.

Kahn, the longtime artistic director of the Shakespeare Theater Co., makes an intelligent choice for the opening scene. He knows that most theatergoers will be familiar with Urie for his breezy television work (“Ugly Betty”). And rather than have us wait, judgmental minds at the ready, for Urie to show up in Scene II, Kahn throws him at us, in full monologue, before the play proper begins.

Swathed in shadows and standing next to what appears to be an open grave, Urie delivers the “too too solid flesh” soliloquy (which usually comes toward the end of Scene II) as a prologue. It’s a gamble that pays off. This monologue offers a surprisingly cogent summing up of the state of Denmark we are about to enter. And it lets us see immediately whether Urie can, well, speak the speech.

He can. In those initial moments, he paints a persuasive portrait of a terminally restless young man at odds with himself and the world, wrestling with doubts and losing. It’s a respectable, A-minus audition piece, and you hopefully await the fuller performance to come.

But very little that follows — from Urie and from the production as a whole — is on that level. The Hamlet who steps into the court of Elsinore is clearly the same guy we just met. But it’s as if he had unleashed himself from some confining mental corset, and he’s grimacing and gesturing up a storm. (He can’t stop moving his hands even when they’re in his pockets.)

Perhaps feeling that there’s no point in competing with a royal tornado, the rest of the cast turns in nigh-invisible performances that lean toward somnolence or stiffness. Even that old windbag Polonius, played by Robert Joy, is less a bombastic grandstander than a dry-as-dust martinet.

As his doomed daughter (and Hamlet’s sometime girlfriend), Ophelia, Oyin Oladejo exudes such common-sense solidity that she seems shatterproof. Madeleine Potter, as Hamlet’s lusty mother, Gertrude, has a commandingly ripe presence, but her mind often seems to be elsewhere (maybe wondering where she left the crown jewels).

Alan Cox’s King Claudius (who murdered his brother, Hamlet’s father) projects little menace. He’s soft around the edges, like some lazy fat cat who lucked into the throne by accident rather than regicide.

And it’s hard to imagine his being in charge of the sinister, all-seeing state summoned by John Coyne’s set, with its walls of video monitors and hidden cameras and microphones. (The same visual motifs were deployed more effectively in Robert Icke’s production of “Hamlet” in London last year, starring Andrew Scott.)

There are also smartphones galore. Hamlet and Ophelia text each other their messages of love. And a game Claudius photobombs a selfie being taken by Hamlet’s college chums, Rosencrantz (Ryan Spahn) and Guildenstern (Kelsey Rainwater).

Hamlet uses his phone to make the occasional note-to-self (including that “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain”). If only those notes included the advice Hamlet later gives to the traveling company of players.

“In the very torrent, tempest and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness,” he tells the actors as they prepare to stage a Hamlet-tweaked tragedy. Since Urie is delivering this counsel in full torrent-tempest-whirlwind mode, you can feel the other actors just itching to roll their eyes.

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Production Notes

‘Hamlet’

Through March 4 at Sidney Harman Hall, Washington; 202-547-1122, shakespearetheatre.org.

Running time: 3 hours.

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