Through June 22: St. Louis Shakespeare Festival Delivers a Hamlet Who's the Prince of Mid-Century Melancholy
A sleek, emotionally resonant production transforms Forest Park into a noir-tinged court of grief, power and presence
There is a peculiar clarity that sometimes emerges from chaos—a phenomenon to which live theater is especially attuned. Just days before the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival was set to unveil its 25th-anniversary production of “Hamlet,” a tornado swept through Forest Park, toppling lighting towers and damaging the set. As if that weren’t enough, a last-minute injury forced a casting change with Grayson DeJesus stepping into the role of Laertes with about a day’s notice. One might have expected a production marred by hesitation or at least by the visible seams of contingency.
Instead, what unfolded on opening night was a “Hamlet” of remarkable poise and polish—an interpretation as stylish as it was emotionally resonant. Directed by Michael Sexton, this staging was wrapped in a mid-century modern aesthetic – not as a gimmick but as a lens. It provided a cool, tailored frame through which the play’s enduring questions of grief, power and identity are refracted anew. The result is a production that feels both timeless and acutely of its moment—an elegy in pinstripes haunted by the ghosts of 20th-century conflict and cocktail-hour power plays.
Sexton’s Denmark is a world of sleek surfaces and simmering tensions, where the ghosts of World War II and the Cold War flicker at the edges of the frame enwreathed with birth-of-the-cool music and sound design. Scott C. Neale’s set design is central to this atmosphere and is masterful. His predilection for blood red—used sparingly, splashingly and with surgical precision—infuses the stage with a sense of latent violence and emotional volatility. The set’s clean lines and modular geometry evoke modernist restraint and psychological entrapment.
But it is in the scene between Hamlet and Gertrude, culminating in Polonius’s death, that Neale’s vision reaches its apex. Here, part of the action unfolds behind deep red curtains, while a cage-like box thrusts forward into the audience’s space. The effect is both theatrical and cinematic—like a Zoom call with the background blurred, our focus drawn with uncanny precision to the emotional core. The tension is palpable, the staging intimate and claustrophobic. We see and feel exactly what the scene demands: the collision of fury, fear and fatal misjudgment. It is a moment of visual and emotional clarity that lingers long after the curtain falls.
Neale’s thrust stage collapses the distance between court and crowd, rendering the political personal and the personal perilously public. The play-within-a-play, the confrontation between Hamlet and his mother that ends in Polonius’s demise, Ophelia’s funeral and the climactic duel all gain a visceral immediacy that feels less like spectacle than confrontation.
At the center of this haunted court is Michael Khalid Karadsheh’s Hamlet, a performance replete with emotional granularity. Karadsheh’s prince is not the brooding intellectual of tradition but something more volatile and tender—a young man still forming, still flinching. His soliloquies are delivered as direct appeals, intimate and urgent, rather than inward musings. Under Denisse Chavez’s stark lighting, his “To be or not to be” becomes less a philosophical inquiry than a cry into the void—a young man illuminated and isolated by the very act of questioning.
Oana Botez’s costume design is a study in subtle storytelling. Her wardrobe choices evoke a world of brittle decorum and deceptive appearances—tailored suits, vintage silhouettes and cocktail-party elegance that mask the emotional turbulence beneath. Most striking is her treatment of Hamlet himself. Karadsheh’s shirts shift in color throughout the production, each hue a quiet metaphor for his evolving state of mind. From pale tones in his early scenes to darker, more saturated shades as his grief and fury deepen, the progression is never overt but always felt. It’s a masterstroke of visual psychology—costuming not as decoration but as dramaturgy.
Brandon Wolcott’s sound design lends the production its brooding pulse but it is Brady Lewis’ live trumpet that gives it soul. His playing—by turns mournful, sultry and sharp—threads through the action like a ghost in its own right, evoking Miles Davis’s “Sketches of Spain” and anchoring the production’s noir sensibility in a soundscape both intimate and expansive.
Sarah Chalfie’s Ophelia, introduced in a cardigan and pedal pushers, immediately subverts expectations. She is no fragile bloom, no tragic cipher. Chalfie and director Sexton imbue her with wit, agency and a kind of radiant defiance. Her descent into madness is not a collapse but a combustion—physical, unpredictable and deeply human. Unlike the ethereal Ophelias of Jean Simmons or the overwrought pathos of Kate Winslet, Chalfie’s is a woman undone not by fragility but by force, by the unbearable collision of love, loss and constraint.
If Karadsheh is the production’s – and Shakespeare’s emotional axis – the ensemble provides its tensile strength. Reginald Pierre’s Horatio is a study in quiet loyalty, a steadying presence amid the storm. Glenn Fitzgerald’s Claudius, clad in the play’s early scenes in a vaguely militaristic helmet that evokes fascist authority and Cold War paranoia, is a potent performance of controlled disintegration. His unraveling—punctuated by Lewis’s eerie trumpet and a ghostly scream that seems to echo from some Dickensian underworld—is as chilling as it is inevitable (in this production’s interpretation, anyway).
Jennifer Ikeda’s Gertrude is a woman caught in the crosshairs of love and survival, maternal but never meek. And Mark Nelson’s Polonius, often played for laughs, is here rendered with such sincerity that his farewell to Laertes earns spontaneous applause. Sexton’s decision to reveal Polonius behind the arras before Hamlet and Gertrude enter is a subtle stroke of genius—transforming a comic eavesdropper into a tragic witness to his own demise.
And what of DeJesus, the eleventh-hour Laertes? He is, quite simply, a revelation. That he learned the role in mere hours is astonishing; that he performs it with such conviction and kinetic energy is something close to miraculous. He’s probably played the part before – but not in this particular interpretation and therein lies the challenging rub. His final confrontation with Karadsheh crackles with grief, rage and the weary recognition of shared doom.
The ensemble—rounded out by CB Brown, Max Fiorello, Daisy Held, Mitchell Henry-Eagles (a delightfully preppy Rosencrantz), Charlie Mathis and Ryan Omar Stack—handles Shakespeare’s language with a clarity and ease that feels almost musically American. This is a “Hamlet" that speaks plainly without ever over-simplifying or pandering.
That the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival has chosen “Hamlet” to mark both its 10th and 25th anniversaries is an appropriate choice and recurring touchstone. The play, like the company, thrives on reinvention. And in this production—born of crisis, shaped by vision and delivered with grace—Tom Ridgely, producing artistic director, and the rest of the Festival’s creative team reminds us why we return – and should return – to “Hamlet.” Not for answers, but for the questions. Not for the past, but for the present it so uncannily reflects.
This is not Shakespeare under glass. This is Shakespeare on the grass in Forest Park – alive, alert and in conversation with the world.
The St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s production of “Hamlet” continues through Sunday, June 22 at the Glen in Forest Park. Admission and lawn seating is free. Reserved seating is available and can be purchased at their website.