Let the Oliviers and the Branaghs strut around as Hamlet. The comic grave digger, who turned up Yorick’s skull, is the role that James McVicker preferred, and the old song-and-dance man played it whenever Shakespeare’s tragedy was staged in the theater McVicker built in 1857. His theater’s grave was dug repeatedly; the place burned down twice and was torn down once, but it always made a comeback. At last, in 1984, the McVicker’s gave up the ghost.
Onetime McVicker’s headliner: John Wilkes Booth.
Year that the McVicker’s introduced Chicago to movies with sound: 1924.
The grave digger in Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film version of “Hamlet”: Billy Crystal.
Number of times the skull of improv innovator Del Close, who willed it to the Goodman Theatre upon his death in 1999, has “played” Yorick: 1.
