Jude Law’s Hamlet sets tills ringing on Broadway

In the supermarket tabloids he is attacked for failing to meet the daughter he has fathered with the Florida model, Samantha Burke. But in New York he can do not wrong. Jude Law's Broadway appearance performance in Hamlet has been so successful that the $2.5m costs of the production at the Broadhurst Theatre have been recouped in less than three months.

"It's heartening to see that Shakespeare can be a commercial success on Broadway," said producer Arielle Tepper Madover, "as well as seeing so many young audience members experiencing their first Shakespeare production.''

Law's star quality is credited with bringing in the young audience to the production, which opened on October 6 after transferring from London.

In his review of the play, the New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote of Law (pictured above with Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Ophelia) that his "undeniable charisma and gender-crossing sex appeal may captivate Broadway theatre-goers who wouldn't normally attend productions of Shakespeare".

Joe Dziemianowicz of the Daily News wrote that Law gave ''a spine-tingling and richly layered performance'' that made you ''forget about his past roles and bad-boy melodramas''.

However, Broadhurst's good news comes in the same week that the latest production of Neil Simon's normally popular play Brighton Beach Memoirs had to be closed only ten days after it opened. One of the reasons offered for the production’s demise was the lack of a star of Law's magnitude. ·