TV recommendation: Slings & Arrows
Last year, a colleague who shares many of my tastes in TV and movies (and who reads this blog; hi, Anne!) asked me if I'd ever heard of a Canadian TV series called Slings & Arrows. I hadn't, but now that I have a Netflix subscription, I've finally gotten around to watching it, and it's rapidly become one of my favorite shows of all time. I'm already sad that it only lasted three seasons, and once I get to the end of Season 3, there'll be no more of it left.
The show is set in the small Canadian town of New Burbage, home of a theater festival modeled on the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. As the first episode opens, artistic director Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette, one of several Stratford Festival veterans in the cast) is directing his umpteenth Midsummer Night's Dream. He's long past the high point of his directorial career: a Hamlet starring promising young actor Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross, who's amazing), who had a nervous breakdown in mid-performance. Disappointed and sozzled after opening night of the Dream, Oliver passes out in the street, where he's hit by a meat truck bearing the motto "Canada's Best Hams." Geoffrey, restored to dubious sanity and running a flat-broke, defiantly noncommercial theater company in Toronto, gets called back to New Burbage for Oliver's funeral. In short order, he's roped into becoming interim artistic director. Oliver promptly returns as a ghost that only Geoffrey can see. History threatens to repeat itself when Geoffrey takes over the festival's production of Hamlet.
There are mad scenes. There are backstage romantic rivalries. There are duels, albeit with stage swords. There's Oliver's ghost, popping up to offer acerbic and unhelpful advice to Geoffrey, and Oliver's skull, which he bequeaths to the festival as a stage prop. There are more Shakespeare allusions than can be counted. There are two aging character actors who provide commentary a la Statler and Waldorf. There's an Ophelia-style suicide attempt that doesn't work because the river in question is only knee-deep. There's a comic villain, a smiling American Lady Macbeth, in the form of an executive from the festival's major corporate sponsor. And there are play-within-a-play moments that remind one alternately of just how disastrous live theater can be, and just how marvelous it is when it works.
When I was a teenager, my dad used to take me to Stratford during the summers when we visited my Canadian grandmother. Slings & Arrows gets the vibe of the place perfectly: an uneasy tension between the need to make enough money to keep the whole thing going (with attendant big-box-office productions, gift shops, and Bardolatrous kitsch) and a deep commitment to doing classical theater really well. The show comes down firmly on the side of not selling out, but the business managers and administrators are still sympathetic (if ridiculous) figures. The writers never lose sight of the contexts—grant funding, corporate sponsorship, obligatory visits from the Minister of Culture—in which plays are produced. There's a terrific scene where Geoffrey, charged with conducting some sort of corporate "leadership seminar" for local businesspeople, decides to just have them explore some text, and walks an accountant through a surprisingly creditable "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow." But there's also a running sight gag involving the festival gift shop with its Shakespeare dolls and inflatable Edvard Munch screams.
And now I'm midway through Season 2, in which Geoffrey takes on Macbeth, amid much superstitious dread. Colm Feore (another actor I first saw in a bunch of productions at Stratford) has turned up as a hilariously creepy marketing genius. And I'm having a hard time not watching each DVD all in one go. In short: if you're at all interested in Shakespeare, theater people, underrated Canadian TV, or utterly brilliant writing, I can't recommend this show highly enough.
Wow, it sounds terrific!
I actually always found the show a little too unsympathetic to people who didn’t believe that Shakespeare was the only type of theatre that is legitimate to enjoy unless you’re a boor. Note that they’re not even insulting the people who listen to hockey games during a show, as the director did the same thing. (Also, of course, Canadians as a whole are willing to hear Abba dissed, but not hockey.)
Heh. I hadn’t thought of the Canadian no-dissing-hockey factor, but I see what you mean. Though I thought the point of all the people listening to the game during the Shakespeare performance was that the play in question was so boringly directed?
Partially the point — but the gist was that hey, it’s ok to enjoy hockey more than Shakespeare, but my god, not a *musical*. Actors in musicals are idiots who don’t know anything! People who like musicals have no culture! There’s room in the world for both kinds of plays, and even (hush) people who enjoy both kinds of plays.
Of course I did enjoy the show, generally — good writing, good acting, Canadian accents. My favourite was the Macbeth season, because that is my favourite of the plays.
Ah. I see what you mean — I hadn’t quite gotten it before. Does the anti-musical element get played up in Season 3? I haven’t gotten that far in the series yet. I actually find Richard kind of endearing in his love for musicals, so carefully modulated when he’s at work among the Shakespeareans. (And I think the show pokes a bit of fun at Serious Theatre purists, as well — Geoffrey’s planned season that includes Pericles, Troilus and Cressida and Murder in the Cathedral comes to mind.)
But I see what you mean about the Mamma Mia mockery — the show doesn’t really put it out there that people do, in fact, like both, or that musicals can be worth seeing, or that there’s anything to rival Shakespeare. But I still love it, even so.
Oh, yeah, season 3 is the worst for snobbery of plays that aren’t Shakespeare and especially musicals. I mean, season 3 is fantastic and I enjoyed the show, but as a dyed in the wool musical fan, I sometimes got a bit irritated. You’ll see.
Oh hey – so glad you found time to watch it! I lent out my dvd’s to someone months ago and I keep forgetting to get them back… so I just rented Due South so I can have another Paul Gross fix.
Due South is now in my Neflix queue. Why can’t US TV be more like Canadian TV?