I Hate Hamlet (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Ever since its opening in April of 1991, theater critics have been uneasy about how to review Paul Rudnick's I Hate Hamlet. The division of critical opinion stems from the different expectations that different writers hold for a theatrical comedy. While most reviewers agree that the humor in this play works well, many question whether a play should not try to accomplish more than just providing jokes, a function that has been taken from Broadway comedies in recent decades by sitcoms on television.

Reviewing the play's original New York run, Variety critic Jeremy Gerard pegged it as "a spun-sugar confection yielding a moment's delight before disappearing into the ether." While recognizing that it "glitters with one-liners," Gerard expected it to close early, being the kind of "boulevard comedy" that had gone out of style in a theatrical world of escalating costs and ticket prices.

Gerald Weales, writing in Commonweal in June of 1991, a few months after the play's opening, began his review declaring surprise that the play was still running, dismissing it as "a foolishness." Sarcastically, Weales suggested that the play's ending, with Andrew Rally turning down a lucrative Hollywood contract to stay in New York and work in the theater, might have made for a funnier joke than most of the play's intended gag lines. "[G] iven the quality of much of the comedy in the play," he wrote, "it would have been a step ahead of dumb-Hollywood-director jokes, male-genitaliain-tights jokes, cigarette-addicted agent jokes twenty-nine-year-old virgin jokes." In the end, Weales asked rhetorically, "Is it knee-slappers like that that define a Broadway play?"

A more balanced critical view came after the play had survived for four years. When it opened in Chicago, Lewis Lazare, writing for Variety, acknowledged that I Hate Hamlet is "lightweight" but entertaining, questioning whether its humor would be able to satisfy audiences without any other traditional theatrical strengths. Calling it a "slick but very thin piece of writing," Lazare praised it by noting that "Rudnick is almost as adept at crafting laugh lines as the master himself, Neil Simon." But, he went on, the "play is done in by the unceasing barrage of clever quips that constantly draw attention to the fact that little else is happening onstage." It is quite possibly this very lightness that has made I Hate Hamlet a favorite of small community theaters, where audiences expect little more than an evening of entertainment.