Michael Nowak, Mike Nussbaum, Kathleen Thompson, Paul H. Thompson
Original production directed by Mike Nussbaum
Starring Tracy Connor, Colleen Crimmins, Judith Easton, Ricardo Gutierrez, Michael Krawic, Michael Nowak, Paul Thompson

“The idea here was to take Shakespeare’s work and remake it as a Hollywood noir mystery. In this case Hamlet’s mother and father aren’t the king and queen of Denmark, they are the owners of a Hollywood studio. When Hamlet, now called Nat Hamill, comes home from World War II in 1945 he finds that his father is dead and that his mother (Shawna Tucker) has set up house with his father’s brother (Mike Nowak) – just as in the original drama.

“Certainly a good bit of what makes this whole show sing is the great script. It makes a first-rate modern mystery out of Shakespeare without seeming to labor to stay close to the original story. And it is chock full of great one liners – for example, there is the one about the starlet so dumb that “she went to bed with the writer.”
Jack Hafferkamp, Edge Media Network, Highly Recommended

“…Part of the fun of this parody is following the smart moves authors Michael Nowak, Mike Nussbaum, Kathleen Thompson, and Paul H. Thompson made in recasting Shakespeare’s tragedy as a noir murder mystery set in 1945. But their smartest move was not letting themselves be enslaved by their source material. This isn’t a note-by-note transposition but a funny, engrossing riff that retains the melody while leaving room to jive.”
Tony Adler, Chicago Reader, Highly Recommended

First, let’s make one thing clear: this is not Elizabethan verse tarted up in storefront-circuit modern dress. No, this revival from the Golden Age of off-Loop Theater is a homage to the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, as translated by Hollywood into the cinematic genre known as film noir. And if classics buffs detect in the plot a resemblance to a certain tragedy by William Shakespeare – well, everybody’s entitled to their opinion.

The year is 1945. Laconic PI Harry receives a call from his recent army buddy, Nat Hamill, who has discovered a recorded message leading him to suspect that his father, the head of a megamillion-dollar movie company, was murdered. Harry goes to Malibu to investigate the Hamill household: merry widow Lillian, slick uncle Ralph, meddling business manager Paul Owen and his two grown children, playboy Keith and druggie Anita – every one of whom have a motive to bump off the late studio chief.

Of course, Nat’s war experience has left him somewhat mentally unstable, but when a reel from “Double Indemnity” is slipped into a private screening and Ralph goes bughouse, revenge soon overtakes law in the quest for justice.

Collaborative authors Michael Nowak, Mike Nussbaum, Kathleen Thompson and Paul H. Thompson have crafted their requisite frozen-lipped repartee (“Who’s been fiddling with your thermostat?” asks a flirtatious Anita, only to receive the gruff reply, “Maybe the pilot’s out”) so skillfully that it almost eclipses the keen accuracy of their literary transposition:

A comedy duo called Rosie and Gillie pay a visit, a pair of morgue attendants swap philosophical observations and the District Attorney is named ‘Jordon Brass.’ Since the prize is not a kingdom but money, and the weapons not swords or daggers but guns, the victims don’t all die as we expect, but in the end, Harry and Brass are left to clean up the loose ends as honorably as they can.
Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City Times, Highly Recommended