Legendary Canadian ballet dancer Guillaume Côté is retiring.
The longtime principal dancer and Choreographic Associate of the National Ballet of Canada, as well as Artistic Director of Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur, is finally setting aside his slippers after more than a quarter-century with the National Ballet, a tenure rivalled only by fellow Canadian Karen Kain.
Côté’s final performances with the National Ballet will be in June next year, but in the meantime, he’s partnered with another Canadian legend for a once-in-a-lifetime Shakespeare adaptation, Robert Lepage’s The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, on now through April 7, 2024, at the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre. The can’t-miss dance event of the year, the Lepage/Côté Hamlet is an evening of adventurous, innovative spectacle.
Hamlet marks the second collaboration between Lepage and Côté after their 2018 Norman McLaren tribute, Frame By Frame. That show combined video projection with minimal sets for a tribute to the acclaimed animator, whose most famous work, Pas de Deux (1969), remains arguably the most important Canadian short film ever made (sorry, Cat Came Back). This time, the pair have chosen to take on the most famous work in the English language, with Lepage directing and Côté starring and choreographing.
Like much of Lepage’s oeuvre, this Hamlet plays with light and perception to great visual effect, with inventive use of shadows, masks, and other tricks of the Lepage toolbox. (We last wrote about Lepage when he brought his fascinating “Library at Night” mixed-reality installation to Toronto’s The Lighthouse venue.)
That said, audiences may be surprised to discover this is basically a faithful adaptation of Hamlet, albeit without Shakespeare’s dialogue. The age-appropriate cast, which includes quinquagenarians Robert Glumbek and Greta Hodgkinson as Claudius and Gertrude, alongside septuagenarian Bernard Meney as Polonius, is joined by younger dancers including Carleen Zouboules (Ophelia) and Lukas Malkowski, whose breakdancing skills get put to great use as Laertes. Rounding out the cast is ballerina Natasha Poon Woo as Horatio, Hamlet’s best friend, here gender-flipped to a female role. Côté is, of course, the title prince himself.
Lepage is rightly acclaimed as Canada’s most inventive theatre directors, earning worldwide acclaim for his Cirque du Soleil productions and an award-winning revamp of Wagner’s The Ring Cycle for the Metropolitan Opera in 2010-2012. Côté, for his part, is a multi-award-winning dancer who, in 2021, was made a “Chevalier de l’Ordre national” in his native Québec. Having performed with major dance companies including La Scala Theatre Ballet, The Royal Ballet (Covent Garden), New York City Ballet, and the Bolshoi, in 2000 Côté, at the age of nineteen, became the youngest dancer to ever portray Prince Siegfried in the National Ballet’s Swan Lake. This Hamlet is, to put it simply, a match made in performing arts heaven.
The prerecorded soundtrack, by composer John Gzowski, is easily the worst part of the production, oppressive in all the wrong ways: relentless, melodramatic, and far too loud (to the point that the speakers went fuzzy from all the feedback). The set design, on the other hand – by Lepage and his collaborators at Ex Machina Productions – is deceptively simple, just a few props, some tables, and colourful curtains/ribbons which are transformed through movement into royal beds, flowing rivers, and more. Wine goblets and flashing swords abound.
While hardly the first dance-infused Shakespeare adaptation we’re seeing this year, Hamlet is easily one of the most exciting productions to arrive in Toronto for quite some time. With an extremely limited run (this week only!), audiences will either have to see it now, or cross their fingers that Lepage/Côté’s dreams of taking it on tour come to fruition.
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For more on The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark and to buy tickets, click here.
For our review of Robert Lepage’s 2022 installation The Library at Night, click here.
