Professor Cecil Isaac first pointed me to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in 1991 in a distraction to a music appreciation course I was taking with him and I doubt I have ever sufficiently thanked him for it. 
Since then I have listened to a radio-theater version multiple times and read and re-read the script many, many multiples of times. So seventeen years later I was extremely tickled to see a poster at Tommy's in Coventry that my wife pointed out with our local Cleveland Shakespeare Festival (CSF) offering both Hamlet and R&G. (I think it was the children who first saw the poster and wanted to know why the guy was kissing the skull!)
Times being what they are (Indifferent? No, just busy!), we were unable to properly schedule our date until the last weekend of the performances, August 2nd and 3rd. The other details of the evenings can be found nearby. Here's what we thought of the plays.
Hamlet
Prior to this weekend I had dusted off my old Yale Shakespeare to re-read. I had forgotten that Hamlet was "just a bunch of old quotes strung together" and re-reading helped bring those famous lines back to the forefront.
CSF did a marvelous job with our local talent and made the evening quite enjoyable. Dusten Welch (Hamlet) was (in my wife's words) either not feeling well or truly mad and either way, his performance worked for us. Erin Barnes (Ophelia) made you want to skip around the stage along with her when she was in love and rush out to comfort her as we watched her heartrending decent toward her death. She captured the "O, woe is me" (III.i.164) very well as she came undone and unraveled before us. She may actually be my favorite performance in this play.
The performance was well-done with both the minimal scenery, props and actors. Nothing was superfluous and yet nothing was lacking either. The partitions were well used and act and scene delineations were clear when they needed to be. The sound was adequate as both the actors and the sound system fought against the gentle NNE wind that cooled us that evening.
All-in-all we had a wonderful evening with a great play and a moving performance with convincing acting. CleveShakes did a wonderful job.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Although I probably didn't need it, I dusted off my 1991 paperback of this name and this past week re-read it as well. Stoppard's mastery of the English language comes out very well in this work. He takes common words, uses them uncommonly, weaves them in such a way as to obfuscate his desired meaning and supplies alternate meanings as the situation calls for it.
I'm not certain how CSF cast the actors for either of these plays. I doubt I would have chosen Allen Branstein (Rosencrantz) or Erin McCardle (Guildenstern) for either (or both) of these works but they both surprised me and delighted me. I think their casting became clearer in R&G as we watched them play off each other and bring Stoppard's work to life. Branstein was convincingly off-kilter while McCardle tried to ground him. And a female Guildenstern? Well, that worked, too.
In fact this time around I noticed a steady and gradual increase in Rosencrantz' madness while Guildenstern actually grew more grounded. I was impressed with both their performances.
At one point my wife poked me and commented that the dialog was maddening, but I would place that more as Stoppard's responsibility than the actors. (Or perhaps she hears such back-and-forth near-meaningless dialog from the children all day?)
My sole complaint was the after-ending when R&G appeared from after being declared "dead" to begin spinning coins again. Perhaps it was an attempt to continue the humor and comedy of this play after the large body count at Hamlet's ending. Maybe that makes it more family friendly, but they were "dead" and dead they should remain. A minor point perhaps, but it did lessen my enjoyment and confuse my wife.
Overall
Many thanks to CSF for putting these two marvelous plays on and making them so accessible. There were large audiences both evenings and folks genuinely seemed to have good time. I certainly enjoyed both and so did my wife. Being able to do so in a weekend was icing on the cake.
