Old. Play in Manhattan

Hamlet (by William Shakespeare; produced by Michael Todd) brought Maurice Evans back to Broadway in the shortened, sharpened version with which he wowed G.I.s in the Pacific. It is frankly a tough guy's Hamlet, with the Prince himself anything but a softie. It moves swiftly and mounts steadily with the crackle of great melodrama. It cuts boldly across whole scenes--there are no gravediggers, no "Alas, poor Yorick," no obsequies for Ophelia. It cuts boldly across time: Actor Evans has laid it in a 19th-Century Denmark of waltzes and tight trousers.

The 19th Century proves a useful anachronism, lifting the play out of semibarbaric shadow without exposing it to too modern a glare. And the self-mocking, self-pitying, sardonic, introspective Prince is in many ways a perfect 19th-Century hero: a child--as he was actually the great-grandfather--of Byronism. Actor Evans, however, does not play him that way. His Hamlet, even before it braved possible G.I. guffaws, was a man of energy and action. His Hamlet remains, for that reason, not complex or deeply felt. But it has great stage authority, fine comic and sardonic moments, and elocutionary skill that makes every word of the part clear, every line of it count.

A tough-guy convert to Hamlet, on opening night was Producer Todd's great friend Toots Shor, whose Manhattan restaurant is the sports world's second home. Toots's tribute: "it's real cops-&-robbers stuff, with class." And during the intermission, according to Columnist Earl Wilson, Toots remarked: "I'm the only bum in the audience that's going back in just to see how it comes out."

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