Fat Ham is a Tasteful Tale For The Modern Age

Fat Ham is a radiant phoenix soaring through the ashes of Hamlet’s tragedy. With a lively set and explosive characters, this show is a sweet to the sweet.

We follow the story mainly from Juicy, a Queer Black man who struggles with the recent union of his mother, Tedra, and his uncle, Rev. The couple, who married shortly after the death of Juicy’s father, hosts a barbecue party to celebrate. While Juicy helps set up the backyard for the party, the ghost of his dead father visits him and orders him to kill Rev, revealing he was the one that killed him. From there, the story spirals into chaos including musical performances and questionable monologues, while introducing us to the reimagined versions of Hamlet’s characters. Giving a fresh adaptation that branches out from the original play, we see how a story of a woeful prince of Denmark becomes a tasteful tale for the modern age.

Fat Ham does well on transforming the story of Hamlet and making it its own. With retellings, it’s difficult to create a story that remains unpredictable while maintaining the core bones of its inspiration. Fat Ham masterfully achieves this, managing to surprise its audience while easing them in with what they think they know is about to happen. And for those who have not even heard the story of Hamlet, it's still a pleasure to walk into the theater not knowing what to expect, becoming delightfully entertained. Fat Ham manages to keep the wit that Hamlet had while modifying it to be understood in a contemporary context. With a surprisingly intellectual monologue about gingerbread men in augmented reality, and a fun twist on the phrase “ay, there’s the rub,” the cleverly transformed dialogue leaves nothing rotten in this star-bright theater.

As well as expanding the Shakespeare play into a modern experience, this adaptation flourishes in giving more depth into the characters that the original characters in Hamlet might have lacked. Opal, who is derived from Ophelia, becomes more than a love interest that Hamlet cherishes and discards whenever he pleases. She wishes to break free from the beliefs that her mother, Rabby (Fat Ham’s Polonius), enforces on her. Along with Opal, we have her brother Larry, our modern Laertes. More than a vengeful son and brother, Larry has his own dilemmas and is given the freedom to navigate them during the play. Unlike Hamlet, whose characters seemed to exist solely within the story, Fat Ham writes these characters beyond the stage, each of them having their own aspirations, dreams and characteristics. It feels as though we are truly able to see the characters for who they are, rather than a piece of fiction that we pretend is real. Watching the play live also adds onto this effect, as you can see for yourself that they do exist right in front of you, seeing them interact with other characters, and even interacting with the audience, feeling like a confidant for the characters on stage. To write a character in a way that evokes emotion from the audience is a skill that is difficult to manage, yet that skill is displayed well in the character writing of Fat Ham.

While Hamlet is drama-heavy, Fat Ham is not afraid of adding some color to the play. The majority of Hamlet retellings stick to the dread-and-woe aesthetic, painting a screen with melancholic filters. Seeing Fat Ham live obviously makes it more lively, as you watch the story unfold in a homey backyard decorated with party streamers and iridescent balloons, the grass offering its characters a resting place when the chair deems to be unfit. All the small details of the colorful set dazzle us with warmth, a feeling usually hard to find in reimagined formats of the calamitous tale.

Not only is color added to the scenery, but also found in the diversity of the cast. Giving us a break from the repeated white characters the original play contains, Fat Ham gives us this story from a lens that Shakespeare might not have had in mind. The characters of Fat Ham are not so different from those they are inspired by, and if you like to take small details and make them into something profound, this could be taken as another piece of evidence that two people who differ in the color of their skin can be very alike, as we are all human. Hamlet and Juicy both believe themselves to be just, while being blind to their own faults. Ophelia and Opal both deserve more in their story than simply being a she-tragedy as a side-plot. Laertes and Larry both want to please others without taking their own feelings into consideration. I could go on, but you get the idea. Fat Ham is so carefully created, something can be found in every detail, intended or not. A beauty to the eye this play truly is.

Fat Ham is what the world needs right now. “To be, or not to be?” That is no longer the question. “To willingly choose suffering, or to allow yourself the pleasures of life?” That is the question. The question that Fat Ham tries to draw attention to. This play is not Hamlet made modern. And yet, it also is. Fat Ham does not merely take the story of Hamlet and regurgitate it into a modern setting. Fat Ham dissects Hamlet, taking bits and pieces and applying them to an outlook that an audience from our age may understand. Fat Ham is a product of its time, a time where we may feel hollow, alone, waiting for our sorrow to smell to heaven so that Death may finally knock at our door. When reality causes us misery, we need fictional worlds to escape to, even for a short while. And though people may love their tragedies, not everyone can handle that when life gives us our own pain. While Hamlet entertains the benefits of avoiding your problems by dying, Fat Ham demands a different approach, showing that a story may have suffering, but it does not have to end in suffering. This is how Fat Ham has succeeded in being a modern adaptation of Hamlet, by displaying a sense of hope that we may be lacking at the moment. This play is for those who seek a ray of sunshine, who need a reminder that even in troubling times, there’s always a chance of a rainbow on the horizon. If a tragedy like Hamlet can be reinvented into the joyous celebration that Fat Ham is, we may be able to rewrite the trajectory of our own world. This show is a reminder to glow before we are reduced to skulls, for that is what it means to be.

Lead Photo Credit: Taj E.M. Burroughs and Aishé Keita in Fat Ham (2024) at Seattle Rep. Photo by Bronwen Houck.

The TeenTix Press Corps promotes critical thinking, communication, and information literacy through criticism and journalism practice for teens. For more information about the Press Corps program see HERE.

This review was written as part of an Arts Criticism workshop at Evergreen High School in Emily Acquino’s Language Arts classes, taught by Press Corps teaching artist Beth Pollack.