Fat Ham on Broadway Tickets

By: James Ijames
Director: Saheem Ali
Choreography: Darrell Moultrie
Cast list: Marcel Spears (as Juicy), Nikki Crawford (as Tedra), Chris Herbie Holland (as Tio), Billy Eugene Jones (as Rev/Papp), Adrianna Mitchell (as Opal), Calvin Leon Smith (as Larry), Benja Kay Thomas (as Rabby)
Design: Maruti Evans
Costume: Dominique Fawn Hill
Lighting: Bradley King
Sound: Mikaal Sulaiman
Other info: Hair and wig design by Earon Chew Nealey, illusions by Skylar Fox, fight direction by Lisa Kopitsky, singing coaching by Deborah Lapidus

Fat Ham is a play set at an outdoor cookout in the South, where Juicy is supposed to celebrate his mother Tedra’s second marriage. But since his mom is marrying his uncle, who killed Juicy’s father, Juicy’s not interested in a party. The ghost of Juicy’s father asks him to take revenge.

Until this point, Juicy’s story resembles Hamlet’s. But Hamlet thinks murdering his uncle is a nobler act than just thinking about it, whereas Juicy doubts whether he must avenge violence with violence like Hamlet did, and wonders what another way might look like. Fat Ham is a Hamlet adaptation, but it’s also a challenge to the cycle of violence within Shakespeare's play and within society.

Fat Ham is directed by Saheem Ali (represented off Broadway in 2021 with the Public’s Merry Wives and MCC Theater’s Nollywood Dreams) and written by James Ijames, who has debuted work in Philadelphia and New York. His plays include Kill Move Paradise, whose 2017 Off-Broadway production was a New York Times Critics’ Pick; Moon Man Walk; and The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, among others.

Fat Ham imade its digital world premiere with Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater after the in-person production was canceled amid the pandemic. Fat Ham off Broadway marked the show’s New York debut.

What to Watch For

• The entire Off-Broadway cast of Fat Ham returns for the Broadway premiere.
• The principal characters in Fat Ham directly correlate with Hamlet characters. Juicy, of course, is Hamlet, and his parents Pap and Tedra represent Hamlet’s parents, leaving Juicy’s uncle as the Claudius figure. Some of the supporting characters even have similar names to their Shakespearean counterparts: Opal and Larry, for example, stand in for Ophelia and Laertes, and Tio represents Horatio.
• The Public Theater stage transformed into an outdoor cookout for Fat Ham. When Wilma Theater’s in-person production was canceled, director Morgan Green presented it virtually instead, and the show was actually filmed outdoors to make the backyard barbecue setting realistic.
• Fat Ham was destined for success before live performances even began. Three days before Fat Ham premiered off Broadway, the show won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
• Shakespeare’s plays often include prophecies, and Fat Ham does too, accidentally. The play isn’t set during the pandemic, but Juicy happens to attend college online. His father's ghost gripes, “You going to school on a laptop!” and calls his son’s education a scam. Little did Ijames know that would soon become the norm…