Frankie J. Alvarez Brings a Fiery Hamlet to Life

Havana — hot, steamy, passionate.

This setting for "Hamlet, Prince of Cuba" at , takes us quite far from Shakespeare's original setting among Denmark's icy islands. Yet the fiery soul of the work transcends geography and feels right at home, set in a tumultuous 19th-century Cuba. 

At the center of that smoldering is Frankie J. Alvarez, who plays the lead in director Michael Donald Edward's Cuban trimmed-down adaptation of the famous work about a young man grappling with the knowledge that his uncle murdered his father and then married his mother.

Alvarez, a Miami native and son of Cuban immigrants, brings a fire-in-the-belly performance that captures Hamlet's gut-wrenching circumstances that Alvarez portrays by flinging, pounding and sliding himself across the stage during Hamlet's descent into madness.

"Maybe another Cuban actor wouldn't have used his body as much," Alvarez told Patch. "That's just my acting style — especially with Shakespeare because the words can get caught up [in your head] so often. It was important to have the words come down from a gut level."

That's not to say, however, that Alvarez's interpretation isn't as much intellectual as it is visceral. Edwards plucked the Julliard-trained actor from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, starting Alvarez's nearly year-long study of the play, research of writings about it and seeking advice from other actors who had played Hamlet before him.

Alvarez, with his dashing Latin good looks, easy smile and slight, sinewy frame, speaks of the deliberate "awakening" his Hamlet experiences when his father's ghost takes over his own body (an uncommon interpretation of the ghost's visit to his son). 

"It was something that invigorated me and got me excited," said the gregarious Alvarez. "The way it is in the play, when the spirit takes over his body ... I find that Hamlet awakens, and finally has purpose in his life. In much the same manner, my performance awakens."

And through this transformation, Hamlet becomes increasingly unpredictable, as does Alvarez's performance, which varies from hair-pulling insanity to moments of comedic genius.

"Michael has given me free rein to play with certain moments," he said. "The way the play is set up, everyone responds to Hamlet. As life mirroring art, the cast is on the tips of their toes because they don't know what Frankie is going to do next, which is great because they don't know what Hamlet's going to do next."

Alvarez is joined by the equally fiery Gisela Chípe as Ophelia and Cuban-born Andhy Mendez as her brother Laertes. Mercedes Herrero, as Hamlet's mother Gertrude, Douglas Jones as Ophelia's father Polonius, and Emilio Delgado (of "Sesame Street" fame) as the new king Claudius, round out the cast.

The Cuban flavor extends beyond the cast to the costuming and the set design, that consists of a commanding, yet dilapidated, Havana building wall. For those who saw the English version of "Hamlet, Prince of Cuba," and didn't pick up enough Cuban influence, they will likely feel different when the cast performs the entire 2-hour, 20-minute play in Spanish during the first week of May.

Alvarez doesn't speak Spanish every day, therefore, "It’s been a tremendous challenge to wrap my mouth around the language." Yet as he approaches the Spanish performance, which have been translated by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, studying the text in the two languages is influencing his performance nightly.

"In seeing the words that Nilo has chosen to translate, he’s found a kind of specificity in either an image or a certain line ... and it changes that choice that I’ve made a little bit," Alvarez said. "I’m finding that both versions are in constant conversation that way."

And to the lack-of-Cuban influence critique in the English versions, Alvarez argues: "What if we were to set it as 'Hamlet, Prince of America,' and you put a jean jacket on me and some leather pants and Hamlet is like Bruce Springsteen? And let’s make Claudius Uncle Sam and everyone is eating apple pie. Well, that’s only a sliver of what it means to be America ... America is three-dimensional and it has a lot more nuances. ... Cuba is just as nuanced and just as three-dimensional."

The Spanish performances with English supertitles run May 3 through May 6.

The cast will then move the production to South Miami Dade Cultural Arts Center in Alvarez's home town of Miami, where he will be performing for the first time for some of his family. With two shows in English and two in Spanish, his hope is to touch others in that community, as well, who may not have been exposed to Shakespeare in this way.

"My melody in Spanish is innately Cuban, so for a Cuban-American audience to hear that in Miami, that bridge will be built a little more fully," he said. "What a great opportunity in my native state, to take it to my home town, to share it with my native culture. It was an opportunity that was just too good to pass up."