Back in 2024, outgoing National Ballet principal dancer Guillaume Côté, teaming with director Robert LePage, landed on Hamlet as the ideal artistic showcase for both Côté’s prodigious dance talents and LePage’s legendary aesthetic sensibilities. While not a National Ballet production proper, The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark was deliberately and well-timed to premiere just around the time Côté was saying his farewells to his long-time N.B. collaborators.
As we wrote at the time, the Côté/LePage Hamlet is a triumph, distilling the essence of one of Shakespeare’s greatest works into a roughly two-hour dance showcase. Remounted now at the same venue where it debuted, Toronto’s Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre, Hamlet remains an impressive piece – and yet another reason to herald the successes of both of these Canadian creative titans.
Hamlet marks the second collaboration between Lepage and Côté after their 2018 Norman McLaren tribute, Frame By Frame, which paid tribute to that celebrated Canadian filmmaker, and in particular his contributions to filmed dance.
This time out, Lepage/Côté gave themselves the unenviable task of translating one of the great English-language works into a (nearly) wordless dance performance. While there is, of course, precedent – see the National Ballet’s own Winter’s Tale – the ballet is necessarily working in a very different space, evoking a familiar narrative rather than properly retelling it. Happily, then, this Hamlet applies a wonderful visual language – specifically, Lepage’s well-established style – with shadowplay, ever-shifting sets, and nifty optical illusions, like the pure blue rippling sheet which serves as the brook in which Ophelia drowns.
That said, audiences may be surprised to discover this is basically a faithful adaptation of Hamlet, albeit without Shakespeare’s dialogue. The familiar plot beats are mostly landed upon (with a few omissions that will not likely be missed by most theatregoers), and the cast – Côté and then Kealan McLaughlin (April 26 matinee) as Hamlet; Sonia Rodriguez as Gertrude; Robert Glumbek as the villainous Claudius – are uniformly excellent. (Glumbek among several dancers returning from the 2024 production.)
Lepage is rightly acclaimed as one of 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. Côté, for his part, is a multi-award-winning dancer who retired from the National Ballet in 2025, following a sterling twenty-six-year career playing nearly all the principal roles in the repertoire.
The one failing of this Hamlet is the score. Ballets may live and die on their choreography, but a weak soundtrack can still undermine what’s otherwise a beautiful spectacle. We continue to hold that the Hamlet score, from composer John Gzowski, is ill-suited for the piece: overly melodramatic, lacking in nuance.
That said, it’s wonderful to have gotten a chance to see this Hamlet again, and we can’t wait to see what Côté/Lepage’s next collaboration looks like.
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For more on The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark and other Show One productions, click here.
