Our production of H’mlet! is special in several ways! Remember, this was 1986. The trend of spoofing Shakespearean plays hadn’t taken off yet. So this original musical (our first!) was a bit of a departure for theatre goers. And what fun it was!
The songs were all based on popular show tunes: Claudius poisons King Hamlet singing “Just an Earful of Poison” to the tune of “A Spoonful of Sugar”. Horatio expresses his fear of the ghost of the old king by singing “A Fright, A Fright” to the tune of “Tonight” from “West Side Story”. You get the idea.
Critics called it “a silly, witty, endearingly crude romp”, “a hilarious recreation of a classic”. Audiences called it a hit and the show was extended to accommodate the crowds.
But most of all, the show solidified Pegasus Theatre’s flair for parodies. One critic called Kurt Kleinmann’s approach to his material “affectionate and funny, rather than biting and vicious”, and that has been a consistent theme to Pegasus productions. It has also maddened the critics at times, those who longed for metaphorical blood to be spilt, but it’s been true to Kleinmann’s vision: “a wild and crazy cosmic view of the inanities and tragedies of human existence.”
So today we celebrate our first original musical, our trend-setting spoof of a classic, by selecting H’mlet! as show #27 in our top 30 countdown!
P.S. The press coverage of this show is also what got a certain fledgling theatre producer, Barbara Weinberger, interested in a small theatre company in Deep Ellum. Six years later, she and Kurt were married, and the rest, as they say, is history!
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