With playgoing on hiatus, the contributors to New York Stage Review have decided to provide our readers with alternate discussions of theater: think pieces, book/music/video reviews, and the like. We would much rather be reviewing live theater, and we look forward to the day when the curtain rises once again.
An overblown, over-the-hill, bombastic combination of Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles—in the justly celebrated Canadian television series Slings & Arrows—celebrates the opening of his stale new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a thriving repertory theater by getting roaringly drunk, not for the first time but the last. Falling face up in the gutter, he is run over by a delivery truck emblazoned with the slogan “Canada’s Best Hams.” He then spends the rest of the three seasons of this flamboyantly macabre and downright delicious series spouting lines and subversively obstructing the new artistic director, a former colleague who—while playing the melancholy Dane—leapt into Ophelia’s grave and into a career-ending nervous breakdown. Alas poor Yorick, as they say; I won’t mention the ghoulish detail about just who henceforth replaces “poor Yorick” after a visit to the local taxidermist.
This is the world of Slings & Arrows, the altogether delectable show that’s pure catnip for those of us with an interest in, and addiction to, all things theatrical. Originally produced back in 2003 (with subsequent seasons airing in 2005 and 2006), Slings & Arrows has now been reissued on DVD, offering the three six-episode seasons plus four-and-a-half hours of extras including commentaries, interview, bloopers, and more. Simultaneous with the new release, Slings will be once more available on Acorn TV, a streaming service featuring British and international programming like—well, like Slings & Arrows.
The series centers around activities at the New Burbage Theatre Festival, which more or less stands in for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada. (Richard Burbage, for the uninitiated, was a pal of the Bard and has gone down in history as the originator of such roles as Hamlet, Othello, Richard III, and Lear). Paul Gross—one of the many Canadian actors showcased in this series—plays the artistic former mental patient, Geoffrey Tennant. (An homage, in misspelled name at least, to the once all-powerful London producing firm of H.M. Tennent?) Stephen Ouimette is the aforementioned ham, Oliver Welles, who takes the notion of Hamlet’s ghost to heart. Martha Burns is Ellen Fanshaw, the leading lady at New Burbage, who has moved from playing Tennant’s Ophelia to Gertrude (in Season 1) and is strenuously battling the inevitable approach of character roles. They are continually abetted and/or combatted by Mark McKinney as Richard Smith-Jones, the business manager of the festival with not-so-artistic inclinations; Don McKellar as Tennant’s nemesis, Darren Nichols, a visionary director in leather pants who brings out the worst in everything; and Susan Coyne as Anna Conroy, the hard-working administrator who does all she can to keep New Burbage running despite myriad crises.
Coyne, McKinney, and that man-in-the chair Bob Martin wrote the series, the first two giving themselves roles that become meatier and meatier as the seasons pass. Martin has a two-episode featured role in Season 1, as an accountant who is surprised to discover the inner actor within. As a not extraneous aside, let us note that an early version of Martin’s The Drowsy Chaperone was first produced in Toronto in 1999, before Slings came into being. It ultimately reached Broadway in 2005, just after the completion of filming of Season 3. In addition to starring in the musical, Martin wrote the book with McKellar (not, as one might mistakenly assume, with McKinney). The Drowsy score came from Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, who supply the Slings & Arrows opening theme song “Cheer Up, Hamlet” and the end-credit “Call the Understudy,” both of which are performed by two letter-perfect elderly retainers who play assorted spear-carriers, Graham Harley and Michael Polley. Lambert and Morrison also wrote the songs for the pop mini-musical in Season 3, East Hastings.
Each season centers around a mainstage production, surrounded by diverse goings-on. The first is Hamlet, featuring imported American heart-throb Jack Crew, who seems to have never set foot on a stage. This is Luke Kirby, who will be familiar—fifteen years later—as the actor essaying Lenny Bruce on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. (He more recently turned up on the New York stage in Richard Jones’s Judgment Day at the Park Avenue Armory, doing a fine job in the leading role.) His Ophelia is Rachel McAdams, whose career took off after Season 1 (and includes an Oscar-nominated performance as a crusading Boston Globe reporter in Spotlight) and was thus unavailable to continue.
Season 2 includes a production of Macbeth, with Geraint Wyn Davies in the title role, while the final season tackles King Lear. This is played by noted Canadian actor and Stratford Festival star William Hutt, giving a toweringly powerful intimate portrait of an aging actor struggling with the end of life. (Hutt died in 2007 at the age of 87, of leukemia.) Also memorable among the large cast are Colm Feore, as a memorably eccentric advertising man; Kenneth Welsh, in a brief role as an auditioning actor; Sarah Polley, as Cordelia to Hutt’s Lear; Oliver Dennis, as an understudy who gets a break, briefly; and Catherine Fitch as the altogether superb resident stage manager.
And what of the eccentricities and peculiarities of this band of players at the fictional New Burbage? I worked on three Royal Shakespeare Company productions staged by then-co-artistic directors Terry Hands and Trevor Nunn back in the 1980s, and let me tell you: the excesses we see in Slings & Arrows ring true, or near enough. East Hastings, New Burbage’s attempt at creating a Cats-sized international behemoth of a megamusical—this being, mind you, about a hooker with a heart of gold—can’t hold a candle to the National Theatre’s 1983 Jean Seberg (which never made it out of London) or the RSC’s 1988 Carrie (which really shouldn’t have).
All of which is to suggest that Slings & Arrows might well provide a most welcome divertissement for theatergoers while there is no theater to go to. I mean, really. You can get the newly available DVD, or you can stream the series on Acorn TV. The 18 episodes encompass about 14 hours, which are 14 hours exceedingly well spent.
The DVD set of Slings & Arrows is now available, or it can be streamed at acorn.tv
