By: Danny Zuko ~Staff Greaser~

I decided to head downtown over the weekend to take in a stage performance of Hamlet, as I had never seen a Shakespeare play before. I found the show quite interesting as well as vastly different than what I had expected.

The show stars a character by the name of Benjamin Gates, who is seemingly obsessed by American history. He is trying to unearth a treasure of a distant relative of his, Thomas Gates, who had passed down the legend of this treasure dating back to the Revolutionary War. Gates knows that the only way to find the treasure is to take matters into his own hands.

Gates enlists the help of his best friend, Riley Poole, to help find the missing pieces of the treasure map. The two know that they will have to get their hands dirty along the way, ultimately discovering that a key to the treasure is on the back of the Declaration of Independence. They must steal the highly guarded document, running into some trouble along the way. This is where they befriend Abigail Chase, the director of the National Archives who ends up becoming a love interest of Gates.

After successfully stealing the Declaration and decoding the map, the group of misfits that now includes both Chase and Benjamin’s father, Patrick, follow the map to the treasure. However, it is not as easy it may seem. They have constant encounters with an old nemesis of Gates, Ian Howe, who is trying to beat Gates to the treasure. After using different historical clues as well as sending Howe on a wild goose chase, Gates, his father, Chase and Poole find the treasure in Trinity Church.

I thought the story was both breathtaking and magical. Though I thought that Shakespeare lived prior to the Revolutionary War, I was clearly mistaken. His storytelling abilities are what separate him from other playwrights in his day.

I hope to continue my reviews of the arts, as this one left me only wanting to go back for more. I will probably go back downtown, as the theatre right next door to this one was debuting a show entitled National Treasure, which will hopefully be just as good as Hamlet was.