Hamlet

Director

Albert McCleery; George Schaefer

Producer

George Schaefer

Writer

William Shakespeare

Music

Roger Adams

Production Design

Richard Sylbert

Adaptor for Television

Mildred Freed Alberg; Tom Hughes Sand

Cast

Notes: The programme was billed as 120 minutes but with many commercials playing time is likely to have been closer to 90; there was an ‘intermission’ between Acts 2 and 3. The UCLA video cassette viewing copy is reproduced from 16mm Kinescope.
General: The production is thought to be the longest drama transmitted to date on American television. It was Maurice Evan’s first television appearance, announced as ‘the first television appearance of one of the theatre’s most distinguished actors’. Brian G. Rose in Television and the Performing Arts (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986), p.199 notes ‘employing a cast of 28 (most of them worked at minimum union scale) and five cameras and utilising three weeks rehearsals, the show’s final cost for NBC was a huge $180,000; Hallmark Greeting Cards contributed $100,000 as sole sponsor’.
Reviews: Griffin, Alice ‘Shakespeare Through the Camera’s Eye’, Shakespeare Quarterly 4.3 (1953) pp. 33-4. ‘Maurice Evans - an Actor Discusses his TV Debut’ New York Times (26 April 1953). One reviewer believed the production to be ‘an experience belonging uniquely and indigenously to television itself’. Flora Rheta Schreibner ‘Television’s Hamlet’ in Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television’ vol. 8, no. 2, Winter 1953, p. 150-5.

SHAKESPEARE