Whooping some sucka soon at
the Hollywood Fringe Festival
Kung Fu Hamlet is of your enjoyment. Many Martial Arts battles fought on stage make excitement pleasure. Your favorite Shakespeare theatre came alive in style of Kung Fu cinema. Like dancing artwork of comedy battle scenes, Kung Fu Hamlet will punch your heart and kick your soul into laughter or weeping. Your stupid will change to smart after knowledge of Hamlet and Kung Fu are seen together. Bring children, elderly, adults and students to this great of new theatrical innovative.
Reviews of Past Performances
Best bets: Jan. 12th–18th
THEATER: KUNG FU HAMLET
by Dominic P. Papatola from The Pioneer Press
Now playing: If you see only one martial arts version of a Shakespearean classic this year, make it this one. In a just world, whoever came up with the idea for this flat-out hilarious staging of "Hamlet" as an old-style martial-arts movie — complete with bad lip-synching and slo-mo battles — would receive scads of NEA funding and commanded to produce more of the same. For the time being, No Refunds Theatre will just have to settle for your 15 bucks.
"Kung Fu Hamlet" a Must-See
by Dominic P. Papatola from The Pioneer Press
Gob-smackingly funny, this show—which delivers precisely what its title suggests—might just be the quintessence of a Fringe show. Imagine, if you will, the tortured Prince of Denmark as a Bruce Lee wannabe in a badly synched film. Imagine that that film riffs with unapologetic ridiculousness on everything from trash TV to Elizabethan intrigue. Now put it all on stage. Not enough? Toss in some legitimate, smack-down martial-arts action, including a Kung Fu catfight. Top it off with one of the worst puns in the English language. This ingenious blend of pop and classical culture has it all.
"Roll over Bill Shakespeare: Medieval Denmark meets Hong Kong in Kung Fu Hamlet"
by Bob Gilbert
from Grand Gazette, August 2002
In No Refunds Theatre Company's version of "Hamlet," the perplexed Dane kicks butt. Fans of William Shakespeare have never seen anything quite like "Kung Fu Hamlet". Think not of Sir Lawrence Olivier or Mel Gibson in the title role; think Bruce Lee or Jet Li. The drama in the royal court at Elsinore becomes a Jackie Chan Hong Kong adventure replete with gratuitous violence.
No Refunds have taken the Shakespearean tragedy and turned it into a comedy, reducing it in the process to eight characters and translating it from Elizabethan English to Chinese to modern English -- with all of the typical grammatical mistakes. Traditionally a three-hour play, the company has whittled it down to seven scenes whose total running time is just under an hour.
"Kung Fu Hamlet" takes the elements of the kung fu movies popularized by Lee and grafts them onto one of the most popular plays in English literature. The new play was written by Gabriel Llanas, a recent Macalester College graduate. It is directed by Matt Dawson, a fellow Mac grad, Grand Avenue resident and black belt in karate. In fact, six of the eight actors on stage have black belts in karate.
Dawson has watched 40 Kung Fu movies since he began work on the play in February. According to him, kung fu movies are a middle-brow art form in Asia and their story lines are as predictable as a Shakespearean tragedy. They typically tell the story of a young man in martial arts training who is skillful, though not the best fighter. Enter the villain with white hair, bushy eyebrows and a handlebar mustache. He roughs up the protagonist and kills his master. The student of karate finds a new master, learns a more advanced technique and avenges his old master's death by taking out the bad guy.
"Obviously, Hamlet is the protagonist," Dawson said. "He is contending with his uncle, Claudius, who murdered his father and married his mother. One of the advantages of working with a play like 'Hamlet' is that everybody basically knows the story. We can actually do what we want to do without having to focus on the plot."
The first scene has the ghost of Hamlet's father informing his son that it was his father's own brother who murdered him. Hamlet misinterprets the ghost's intent and tries to scare him off. The two then do battle.
In fact, there is a fight in each of the scenes in "Kung Fu Hamlet." The action increases with each scene, with the really difficult fight moves coming at the climax.
To make it even more authentic Asian drama, the play is dubbed. The actors on stage move their lips, but the lines are read by people back stage.
"We went through and tried to pick the most essential scenes in 'Hamlet'," Dawson said. "The advice scene with Ophelia, Polonious and Laertes is a three-way fight and of course, Polonious has to get killed so that Ophelia can go crazy and kill herself. This way Laertes can come back mad as hell and attempt to kill Hamlet. A lot of people get knocked off in one way or another."
Allen Wong, a recent Macalester history graduate, plays Hamlet. The Kingston, Jamaica, native has studied Northern Shaolin kung fu since he was 10, and he choreographed all of the fight scenes. Wong's specialty is the "drunken fists," an esoteric martial art that mimics the moves of a drunk in order to deceive an opponent before exploding on him.
"What Matt wanted me to do was make (the action) fast with a comical touch," Wong said. "I got a lot of my ideas from Jet Li and Jackie Chan movies, then added a touch of my own."
"Kung Fu Hamlet" is Dawson's directorial debut. The Monona, Iowa, native majored in theater at Mac. After graduating in 2000, he spent a year in Thailand teaching English. The experience convinced him to pursue a career in theater.
One of the biggest challenges for Dawson was casting the play. He didn't want anyone fighting on stage who wasn't at least a black belt. The fighting is advanced, and he didn't want anyone to get kicked in the head.
"We're exploiting a genre that has really taken hold of the American imagination," Dawson said. "In the past two years it has grown out of a cult phenomenon into the mainstream. It's everywhere.
"With 'Kung Fu Hamlet,' we aren't stretching Shakespeare; we're actually putting it through the wash," Dawson said. "Our basic intent is to make it funny. It's not exactly literature, but it is theater."
Kung Fu Hamlet: smart and stupid comedy at its best
by Dean J Seal
Skyway News January 20-26, 2003
Steve Martin once said that comedy should be either really smart or really dumb, and a show that artfully crafts these two ugly twins is rolling back into town.
The Bryant Lake Bowl in the Lyn-Lake neighborhood (cheek-by-jowl with Uptown) is hosting a revival of one of the Fringe Festival's big hits last year. No Refunds Theatre Co. presents "Kung Fu Hamlet," where young prince Hamlet sets out to seek high-flying, spin-kicking, judo-chopping revenge. In addition to coming in fourth in ticket sales out of more than 100 fringe shows, this show made people laugh really hard and made a number of theatre insiders' fave moments from 2002 in the year-end wrap-up emails.
Why risk a remount? The show may have previously sold close to 500 tickets, but hit status at the Fringe does not guarantee a return audience, especially now that the cold is upon us and rumors continue to fly about the Bryant-Lake Bowl theatre being closed -- to be turned into a kitchen or additional pancake-and-egg customer space.
Well, those rumors have been there since the place opened (they seem to come up about every 90 days), and remounts can do well so long as the idea has staying power and a natural audience. With a Monday run, the show is slotted for theater people who can't get out to see shows otherwise. Plus, this show has a draw like "Star Wars"; some people can see it more than once and have just as great or an even better time than the first.
Who would want to see it twice? Kung Fu and martial art practitioners and aficionados, anyone who really likes or hates Hamlet, people who love cheesy overdone lip-synched dialog with badly written scripts and actors calling each other "stupid" a lot, people who like to see cheesy overdubbing recreated on stage with live actors... This thing has a lot going for it.
Director Matt Dawson, who holds a Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do and is trained in Wing Chung Kung Fu and Muay Thai, had long meditated on staging a bad Hong Kong kick-flick. "I wanted it to be alloverdubbed and have lots of fight scenes," said Dawson. "[Then] my brother said we should do 'Hamlet,' and it was like a bolt of lightning."
With images of Ophelia delivering the Quick Mortal Claw dancing in his head, Dawson got down to the nuts and bolts of portraying overdubbing on stage. He assembled a group of martial artists turned first-time "actors" to lip-synch the dialogue spoken by script-holding off-stage actors barely hidden behind a screen. The overdubbing is nothing less than perfect, seamless and theme-compliant. Then he added weird Chinese music, gratuitous rap, and a stunning chorus from "Carmina Burana" to hold the production together.
Allen Wong makes his theater debut in the title role. Wong holds a Black Belt in Bak Shaolin Kung Fu, is trained in "Drunken Fist" style, and is a five-time national title holder in weapons, forms and fighting in Diamond Nationals, US Capitol Classics. The rest of the cast is amply qualified as well, from other martial artists on stage to the tech goddess behind the scenes.
The fights are fun to watch, terribly goofy, and worked into the script in the same showbiz tradition as two kids showing the tap numbers they learned from pop in "Shuffle Off to Buffalo." Family members attack each other for practice, people pick fights and call each other "stupid" (a lot), and friendly banter flies back and forth as they try to kick each other in the face. Even the play-within-the-play gets done as a match, albeit with a more hilarious resolution than Mr. Shakespeare utilized.
I don't know of many stagings of this noble warhorse that offer these special treats: Horatio as the squeaky-voiced cowardly side-kick, Laertes challenging Hamlet to "see if you can shuffle off this Mortal Claw," or Hamlet telling Ophelia to "go to a nunnery and learn some Real Kung Fu!"
This is cheese of the highest order -- a triple cream Camembert of smelly sophisticated bad taste. Go early in the run, in case you want seconds.
City Pages Best of 2003, mentioned in "Best Theater for Comedy"
City Pages April 30, 2003
The Bryant-Lake Bowl is, of course, not exclusively devoted to comedy, but it is home to some of the smartest get-your-laugh-on theater in town, from sketch comedy to one-person shows, and a lot of Fringe Festival revivals. Here's where you can catch the acerbic satire of the Ministry of Cultural Warfare, the rock 'n' roll goofs of Ferrari McSpeedy, the one-of-a-kind phenomenon of No Refunds Theatre's Kung Fu Hamlet, and many of the Twin Cities' best improv groups. Among other notably good-joke-filled productions at the BLB last year were Colleen Kruse's introspective-yet-funny Thirty Days in Frogtown, the perennial favorite Martini & Olive: Holiday Inferno!, and Joshua Scrimshaw's The Worst Show in the Fringe, starring A-list actors David Mann and Craig Johnson. Besides offering consistently high-quality work, the theater's cozy, glass-clinking atmosphere seems to make the laughter all the more intoxicating.