Blackstone Audio is proud to present the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's brilliant production of Shakespeare's disturbing and psychologically rich masterpiece Hamlet. Whether you're a Hamlet scholar or being exposed to this work for the first time, this stunning work of audio theater, fully dramatized with performances by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival cast, is a must-listen.
In Denmark a king is dead. His brother, Claudius, has snatched the throne, and the widowed queen, yet life goes on--for everyone but Prince Hamlet. The prince, fixated on his uncle as the murderer, is charged by his father's ghost to avenge the wrong. Disconnected from the foul world around him, Hamlet strains under the weight of his task, descending into madness, both real and feigned.
Bill Rauch became OSF's fifth artistic director in 2007, after several seasons at the Festival as a guest director. In a total of fourteen seasons there, he has directed five world premieres and sixteen other plays.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English poet and dramatist of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, is the most widely known author in all of English literature and often considered the greatest. He was an active member of a theater company for at least twenty years, during which time he wrote many great plays. Plays were not prized as literature at the time, and Shakespeare was not widely read until the middle of the eighteenth century, when a great upsurge of interest in his works began that continues today.
Established in 1935, the Tony Award-winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival offers an eight-month season with a wide-ranging playbill of eleven productions, including Shakespeare, American classics, musicals, contemporary works, and world premieres. Plays originating at OSF have gone on to be produced by many regional theaters, and its productions have been recognized and honored nationally. In 2011, the Blackstone Audio and Oregon Shakespeare Festival collaboration of Hamlet was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.
Bill Rauch became OSF's fifth artistic director in 2007, after several seasons at the Festival as a guest director. In a total of fourteen seasons there, he has directed five world premieres and sixteen other plays.
Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales on 27 October 1914. In 1934 his first book of poetry,
Eighteen Poems appeared, followed by
Twenty-five Poems in 1936,
Deaths and Entrances in 1946 and in 1952 his final volume,
Collected Poems. He also published many short stories, wrote filmscripts, broadcast stories and talks, did a series of lecture tours in the United States and wrote
Under Milkwood, the radio play.
During his fourth lecture tour of the United States in 1953, a few days after his 39th birthday, he collapsed in his New York hotel and died on November 9th at St. Vincent's Hospital. His body was sent back to Laugharne, Wales, where his grave is marked by a simple wooden cross.
In June 1994, his wife, Caitlin Thomas, died in Italy, where she had spent most of the years of her life after the death of Dylan Thomas. Her body is buried next to his.
