When veteran award-winning radio theater producer Joe Bevilacqua was students in his final semester at Kean College in 1982, he produced and directed a radio version of Hamlet.

Casting Kean faculty and students, and portraying the melancholy Danish prince himself, Bevilacqua not merely finished his nearly four-hour radio adaption of Shakespeare’s biggest work, he do so while holding a double main; producing, acting in, and sometimes writing radio performs for the WKNJ Radio Movie theater he founded about The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark at the college train station; rehearsing and portraying Dr. Martn Dysart in Equus within the Kean Stage; and functioning twenty hours per week at Kean’s Composing and Math Lab. After graduating, Bevilacqua noticed his production of Hamlet picked up and distributed by the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) and shown on public r / c nationwide.

Bevilacqua continued to become perhaps one of the most prolific radio crisis producers in america, as well while an on-camera acting professional in such films as The Take flight Room as well as the Better Angels and in tv shows, including HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.

The master reels of Joe Bevilacqua’s radio production of Hamlet were dropped in the 1980s. On January 6, 2015, while going right through some old files, Bevilacqua found an NFCB newsletter listing a number of his radio dramas, including Hamlet. Then traced the NFCB collection to the University of Maryland Libraries, where it now resides.

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare at an uncertain day between 1599 and 1602. Set in the Kingdom of Denmark, the play dramatizes the revenge Prince Hamlet is certainly instructed to enact on his uncle Claudius. Claudius experienced murdered his personal brother, Hamlet’s father, and subsequently seized the throne, marrying his deceased brother’s widow, Gertrude.

BONUS Monitor: ‘Another Point of View (Hamlet Revisited),’ originally aired on the CBS Radio Workshop June 22, 1956.