A Comedy, ‘Fat Ham’ Offers the Freshest of Takes on a Shakespearean Tragedy 

You don’t need to have read ‘Hamlet’ or seen a single production to enjoy the heights of raucous hilarity reached by James Ijames and Saheem Ali and the actors, or the depths of poignance that accompany them from time to time.

Joan Marcus
Marcel Spears and Calvin Leon Smith in ‘Fat Ham.’ Joan Marcus

In “Fat Ham,” James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, rip-roaringly funny adaptation of “Hamlet,” something is rotten in the state of North Carolina — though as Mr. Ijames has drily noted in the playbill, the setting “could also be Virginia, or Maryland or Tennessee. It is not Mississippi, or Alabama or Florida. That’s a different thing altogether.”

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