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Prior to Broadway, it was staged at the Charlottetown Festival in 1974 and 1975 as Kronberg 1582, and toured eastern Canada in 1975, with Brent Carver as Hamlet and Beverly D'Angelo as Ophelia. Renamed Rockabye Hamlet and substantially revised by Jones under the direction of the producer Gower Champion, it opened 17 Feb 1976 at the Minskoff Theater on Broadway and closed after only seven performances. It lay in the "dust heap" for years, until the Group of Several approached Andrew to revise the show and make it more contemporary. With the brilliant guidance of Boko Suzuki as musical director, the show was transformed into a dance-piece/punk rock musical with more than its fair share of dry humour. Laertes became a drag artiste who travelled to Paris for his shows and sits on the edge of the stage for his 11 o'clock number. That sort of thing...!
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