Is Orson Welles the Perfect Hamlet or the Absolute Opposite? There's Only One Way to Find Out.

  Love Goddess, the musical in which I play – among other husbands of Rita Hayworth – Orson Welles, opens this Friday and you can get tickets here. We're deep into tech week so I don't have much time to blog, and I haven't even listened yet to what I'm posting today, but I'm looking forward to.

 

Archie, Jane, me, Imogen, and Joey. I believe it's called proof of sweat.

 

 You'd have thought, of all the big Shakespearean roles that the erudite, intellectual, procrastinatingly impatient, fatally disappointed, theatre-obsessed Welles had tackled, Hamlet would obviously be one of them, and it turns out you'd be right. The only reason I didn't know this until I looked it up today is that it was back in 1936 when Welles was still twenty-one, in a self-directed radio adaptation. Of course he'd already staged Macbeth by then. My parents sent me the first volume of Simon Callow's massive biography "The Road To Xanadu" for my birthday, so I'll see what that has to say about it...

 

 Oh. Okay, so much for my interpretation then. Of either Welles or Hamlet, take your pick. 

 But no, both feared they might be phonies, both feared their own monstrousness while also wishing they were more like the monsters, and there's not a single speech of Hamlet's I can't imagine in Welles' voice, so maybe Callow is wrong. Then again, he did write a massive biography. Then again, he says it was a thirty-minute adaptation, and it's actually two thirty-minute adaptions. Then again, they didn't have the internet back in 1995. Then again, we do.

 

 

UPDATE: Okay, I've listened to it. I think it's fair to say there is one quite heavy omission. Can you guess what got cut?