This comes under the header of neither fish nor foul...neither quite historical yet, nor any longer contemporary. But I do take note of the fact that the Canadian television show Slings and Arrows premiered 20 years ago today. The program ran in Canada in three six-episode seasons, from 2003 through 2006, and debuted in the States a couple of years later.
I hugely relished this highly original and deftly delivered program, though it must be confessed that I am squarely part of the niche audience it is destined ever to be restricted to. It is basically "inside baseball" about the running of a mid-sized regional theatre company. I spent a couple of formative years under the roof of a similar company, and have spent much time since in and out of theatres small, medium and large, so this show comes as an exceedingly isolated instance of feeling "seen" in a contemporary landscape where the vast majority of people have no experience of live theatre, might not even know that it still exists. The fact that just a few generations ago EVERYONE knew what live theatre was because it was the only form of entertainment has always vexed me, is in fact the driver of why I do what I do.
In Slings and Arrows, Paul Gross plays a good looking and charismatic, but rapidly unravelling actor who suddenly finds himself tasked with the heavy lift of running a Shakespearean theatre company called The New Burbage Festival (already an insider joke, Richard Burbage had been a star of Shakespeare's Globe). Recently institutionalized, his character had a breakdown during a performance of Hamlet, during which he ran offstage screening (which very closely echoes something that once happened to Daniel Day-Lewis). In the meantime, he has been running a fringe type alternative theatre called Théâtre Sans Argent (theatre without money). Then he is recruited to the much harder job of running the New Burbage.
Keeping a theatre going is stressful and taxing even to someone in the best of mental health, full of all manner of human management challenges, as you must constantly placate egotistical artists, demanding and often obtuse board members and bureaucrats, a predatory press, and a very judgy public...all while making art. Living in then middle of such a thing can only trigger an existential crisis. The genius of Slings and Arrows is that it ties Gross's issues in with the very Shakespeare plays he is producing, and each season (as an artist will do) he finds ways to draw from his own situation to illuminate the plays he is directing. Each season of the show is built around a Shakespeare play, Hamlet, MacBeth and King Lear. Obviously, the title for the show is drawn from the "To Be or Not to Be" speech from Hamlet.
The director is not strictly alone in his predicament. There are leading ladies (Martha Burns, Susan Coyne) in his life, the theatre's business manager (Mark McKinney from The Kids in the Hall), not to mention the literal ghost of a father figure (Stephen Ouimette), his deceased mentor, the previous director of the New Burbage Festival. But these sounding boards and wisdom-dispensers aren't always helpful. The first season also features an early career, pre-Mean Girls performance by Rachel McAdams.
McKinney and Coyne also co-created and wrote the series, along with Second City Toronto's Bob Martin, who also wrote The Drowsy Chaperone. In Slings and Arrows they delivered a kind of tour de force melange of art and life that amounts to a dazzling magic trick (a Robertson Davies nod for you Maple Leafs). A love poem to the theatre, one that acknowledges that the object of one's obsession is a demanding and cruel harridan.
Oh, and, best of all, people say "aboot" a lot.
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