Photos: HAMLET Audio Play Premieres At Tribeca Film Festival

Last week, HAMLET, a new 6-episode audio adaptation of the classic play by William Shakespeare, celebrated its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival. At this special one-night-only event, hosted by The Public Theater, the audience wore headphones to listen to the riveting first 30 minutes of the project. Check out photos from the premiere.

The experience was followed by a live onstage discussion with HAMLET’s creative team and leading actor, moderated by Davy Gardner, the audio curator of the Tribeca Festival.

Adapted and directed by Jeremy McCarter with binaural sound design by Tony Award-winning Mikhail Fiksel, HAMLET is NOW available to listen for free on all major podcast streaming platforms. Visit Hamlet.fm for more information.

HAMLET stars Daniel Kyri, a breakout star of NBC’s “Chicago Fire,” and is executive produced by Emilia LaPenta and Jeremy McCarter.

A mind unraveling, a kingdom tottering, a ghost that won’t rest. This bold new take on Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy drops the listener inside the fractured perspective of the grieving prince. As each day brings alarming new revelations and the whispers get louder, can Hamlet stay sane long enough to uncover the truth and fix what’s broken?

“Audio storytelling has an amazing superpower: to make you feel that you’re inside a character’s head,” said Jeremy McCarter, the adapter/director. “Our HAMLET uses that superpower to give listeners a new way to experience the most famous play ever written, to go inside the ‘nutshell’ of his disintegrating mind, to hear what he hears and hopefully feel what he feels as his world shatters around him. I’m enormously excited to share the insights that this amazing cast and creative team have found in Shakespeare’s story, and to discover how relevant Hamlet’s journey is in 2025, when our world seems even crazier than his.”

“This audio-only Hamlet uniquely positions us to experience his unravelling psyche as if it's our own,” said Davy Gardner, Curator of Audio Storytelling at the Tribeca Festival. “In an age of deep uncertainty and fractured attention, the distortion of his reality feels disarmingly recognizable. Make Believe Association’s HAMLET is exactly the kind of inventive and mind-bending audio storytelling that we’re proud to premiere at The Tribeca Festival - especially alongside the remarkable team at The Public Theater.”

Chiara Klein, Director of Producing and Artistic Planning at The Public Theater, said, “We’re proud to welcome our friend and collaborator Jeremy McCarter, and the Make-Believe Association, back to The Public for this exciting premiere. What a thrill to debut this innovation on the Shakespeare canon in partnership with the Tribeca Festival, a fellow iconic fixture of New York culture dedicated to the power of original storytelling."

HAMLET stars Daniel Kyri in the title role. The cast also features Ayanna Bria Bakari (Ophelia), Terry Bell (Guildenstern/Voltimand), Ronald L. Conner (Gravedigger), Eduardo Curley-Carrillo (Ensemble), Daveed Diggs (Prologue), Lorena Diaz (Ensemble), Charles Andrew Gardner (Rosencrantz/Cornelius), Henry Godinez (Priest), Lawrence Grimm (Captain), Erik Hellman (Horatio), Bill Irwin (Osric), Timothy Edward Kane (Laertes), Delia Kropp (Ensemble), Jacob Ming-Trent (Polonius), Roslyn Ruff (Player Queen), Lorenzo Rush, Jr. (Marcellus/Lucianus), Anna Deavere Smith (Player King), John Douglas Thompson (Claudius/Ghost), and Sharon Washington (Gertrude).

Additional creative team for HAMLET includes associate director Sydney Charles, casting by Laura Alcalá Baker, and voice and text coach Julie Congress. Traditional songs were adapted and original music was composed by Nygel D. Robinson and Mikhail Fiksel. The series artwork–a stylized portrait of Daniel Kyri inspired by the play–was commissioned by Make-Believe from rising Chicago visual artist Andrea Coleman.

Photo Credit: Simon Luethi