BBQ ‘Hamlet’ needs more meat

Is Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” the best vehicle for modern questions about race, masculinity and LGBT issues? — that is the question.

Playwright James Ijames’ “Fat Ham,” which opened Wednesday night on Broadway, thinks so. More characters come out of the closet — or get high — in this zany spin on the tragedy than violently perish. 

The play contorts “Hamlet” into a broad dysfunctional family comedy, as it moves the usually anguished action to a lively backyard BBQ somewhere down south.

Done with Denmark, now something’s rotten in the state of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland or Tennessee — we’re not sure which.

That is a fine, if not groundbreaking, idea. Shakespeare’s plays are adapted and relocated all the time — the 1999 movie “10 Things I Hate About You” is based on “The Taming of the Shrew,” while “The Lion King” is “Hamlet” with hyenas. 

And two years ago, “Fat Ham” director Saheem Ali directed a funny, Harlem-set “Merry Wives of Windsor” in Central Park.

However, even though our Hamlet stand-in, Juicy (Marcel Spears), still wants to avenge the death of his father who was murdered by his villainous uncle, he is much more concerned with his personal identity — that is, gay and sensitive in a traditional black family. 

Don’t get me wrong. Hamlet has always been a deeply self-involved guy, but as originally written there is fire behind his narcissism. The prince wanted to expose the truth of an unspeakable royal crime, not the less compelling truth of his sexual preferences.

By comparison, the stakes here, to put it in BBQ parlance, are low and slow. Instead of “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,” Juicy tells us, “I asked my mother for a doll. A black Barbie dressed in pink.” 

During another pseudo-soliloquy, he wails the Radiohead song “Creep” on a karaoke machine, while those around him jerk around in a dreamy interpretive dance.  

And at the silly, superfluous end of the play, we neither mourn nor recover from the exhilaration of a deadly clash. Instead, the characters happily dance to pulsing pop because they’re closer to accepting who they really are. 

Good for them. The trouble is, when you rip out the tragedy and, for the most part, the main character’s propulsive rage and manufactured madness, you’re left with a rather aimless story that leaves its audience feeling hungry for some meat. And empty carbs — the decent humor and overwrought poetry — are not enough to fill the void.

Juicy, who attends the University of Phoenix online (one of the show’s better jokes), is joined at the party by his uncle Rev (Billy Eugene Jones), who secretly had his father Pap (also Jones, as his ghost) killed while he was in prison. Rev then starts getting cozy with Juicy’s outlandish mom Tedra (Nikki Crawford, Gertrude by way of “Real Housewives”), depressing Juicy. 

His best friend Tio (Chris Herbie Holland) is also there for the feast, along with gal pal Opal (Adrianna Mitchell), her repressed marine brother Larry (Calvin Leon Smith) and their hilarious mom Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas). In descending order: Horatio, Ophelia, Laertes and Polonius. 

For a while there’s some satisfaction in experiencing the ways Ijames inventively reconceives Shakespearean plot points and characters.

And, on the design front, it’s clever to replace the usual Danish fog with smoke from a BBQ pit on Maruti Evans’ set.

Yet you start to get the sense that more effort was spent on meticulously setting up the pins than finally knocking them down. The ending is mush.

Still, the cast’s energy is warm and enveloping throughout. Spears’ Juicy, with his sideways glances and Charlie Brown sincerity, is more lovable than any melancholy Hamlet you’ll ever see.

Jones doesn’t come across evil enough to kill anybody, but he’s a font of mischievous energy.

And Holland has a kooky speech late in the play that’s a pleasure to watch and hear, if disconnected from everything else.

That’s the thing. Much of Ijames’ “Fat Ham” is playful ideas that don’t add up. Karaoke and dance parties are fabulous, but instead of smoke and mirrors, give us some slings and arrows.