Hamlets Madness

3 Pages 811 Words

The “Big Bang” at the Hippodrome State Theatre in Downtown Gainesville, Florida is the opening play of the season. It went off with out a hitch and was raved about by a couple of friends of mine who told my girlfriend and me that we needed to attend it; so we did. “The Hippodrome State Theatre is North Florida's only professional regional theatre. Celebrating its 30th year of artistic excellence, the Hippodrome is designated as a Cultural Institution and a State Theatre of Florida” (Hippodrome website). The audience that I shared the pleasure of attending this outrageously funny version of history telling was a very diverse group. I saw people there of all ages, shapes, sizes, colors, and of course sexes. Being that it is a College town there is always going to be more people from the age bracket of 18 – 25 at an event like this. Some events this may not be the case, but in the case of a comedic play down town this is approximately normal.
It is a story of history, a recreation play of all the major events in history. It has a very comedic view of how the world has lived and evolved over the centuries all the way up to what we know as today. The play begins with the two off Broadway creators, “Jed” and “Boyd”. These men are in the borrowed Park Avenue penthouse of Mrs. Sidney Lipbalm to perform their new creation, an epic musical that spans the history of the world from the Big Bang to the present, for potential backers. Their play is budgeted for $83.5 million with a cast of 318 performers and 6,428 costumes. The average running time is 12 hours. Lucky for the backers, the people in the audience, the creators will only be performing “highlights” of the impending extravaganza. The two creators accompanied by a third actor on the piano perform eighteen side splitting musical numbers, singing, dancing, narrating, and portraying every major figure in world and pop history from Adam and Eve, Attila the Hun, J...