The outrageous fortune of Slings & Arrows

To paraphrase the question Stephen Colbert used to ask, is Slings & Arrows a great television show, or the greatest television show?

The 2003–2006 Canadian series depicts the artistic and financial struggles of a fictional Shakespearean theater in New Burbage, Canada, with each of its three seasons centered around the production of a different Shakespeare play. (New Burbage is, of course, also fictional, named after Shakespeare’s leading actor Richard Burbage.) As creators Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney discussed in a fantastic oral history about the show’s origins, Slings & Arrows was initially conceived as a half-hour comedy until they realized they had “too much material here, and too much possibility,” and that they “could really take this seriously instead of it being kind of silly.” Slings & Arrows ultimately became a Shakespearean blend of comedy and drama, darkness and light, and the living and the dead.

It was Coyne’s idea to include a ghost character, which naturally led them to Hamlet and the series-long conceit that Shakespeare’s tragedies could mirror the sea of troubles the characters were navigating. In the opening season, as part of its pursuit of more commercial success, the New Burbage Festival is excited by the arrival of a big movie star to play Hamlet, echoing the time Keanu Reeves played the character in 1995 for the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg. But the production becomes complicated by not only the star’s insecurity but the death of the theater’s artistic director Oliver Welles—run over by a truck full of hams—and the appointment of his replacement Geoffrey Tennant, a former colleague who famously suffered a nervous breakdown playing Hamlet, recalling the time the same thing happened to Daniel Day-Lewis in 1989 (and which Day-Lewis discusses here). Oliver’s dying wish to have his skull preserved so it can serve as Yorick’s skull in future productions is also inspired by actor and improv pioneer Del Close donating his skull to Chicago’s Goodman Theatre for the same reason (a true story that only sort-of happened, as Close’s executor Charna Halpern explained here). Also, fun fact: the actor playing Ophelia is Rachel McAdams, whose career would take off the following year with the release of Mean Girls and The Notebook, both in 2004.

Slings & Arrows | Season 1 | Hamlet

Season Two centers itself around a production of Macbeth at the same time as the theater’s business manager Richard Smith-Jones, attempting to raise the profile of the New Burbage Festival, finds himself easily manipulated, witch-like, by an unscrupulous marketing guru. Geoffrey, meanwhile, hesitates to direct the play out of fear that it’s a very hard script to successfully pull off, and struggles for power in rehearsals with both the egotistical actor playing Macbeth and Oliver’s ghost (who, having played Yorick now also gets to play Banquo’s ghost).

Slings & Arrows | Season 2 | Macbeth

Season Three takes a particularly dark turn as it focuses on New Burbage’s production of King Lear and the stress of working with the elderly actor pulled out of retirement to play the title role. Geoffrey, having reunited with his longtime leading lady Ellen Fanshaw, has his own struggles with potency and, because Oliver’s ghost won’t stop tormenting him, fears he too may be going mad. The theater becomes a divided kingdom with the ascendancy of a successful new musical on its second stage, and when Lear loses not just its stage but all its fancy designs and special effects, the lesson gets underscored that sometimes the only thing Shakespeare needs are his glorious words and the actors to speak them.

Slings & Arrows | Season 3 | King Lear

One unfortunate (and probably unintentional) undercurrent in Slings & Arrows is the idea that most directors are frauds, and that actors are powerless children looking to be led, notions dramatized most effectively by the character of Darren Nichols, an aging enfant terrible whose productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet are perfect satires of theatrical pretension. That’s why it’s so satisfying when we see the New Burbage company actually doing the work: debating approaches to Shakespeare and making discoveries in rehearsal. These scenes ground the more outrageously comic complications that somehow manage to be both wildly over-the-top and—amazingly—completely believable. These folks are genuinely good at what they do.

Slings & Arrows co-creator Bob Martin went on to both star in and win the Tony Award for writing the book to the musical The Drowsy Chaperone, and he observed that no matter what kind of theater you work in, “the personalities are the same, the dynamics are the same, the financial challenges, the life backstage, the relationship with the stage manager, everything, the same.” Martin has now brought this “universal language” to his new series American Classic, a sequel-in-spirit-only that premiered earlier this year on the streaming service MGM+. Kevin Kline stars as an old theatrical lion whose public meltdown goes viral after his disastrous Broadway performance of Lear and he’s forced to return to the community theater founded by his parents and still managed by his brother and sister-in-law. American Classic is gentler than Slings & Arrows—probably because it focuses on a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town rather than one of Shakespeare’s tragedies—and it’s filled with the kind of comic and heartfelt moments of which Kline is a master. (He even brilliantly busts out “What a piece of work is a man” while asking for a bank loan.) I’m rooting for it to get a second season, because American Classic is a sweet and charming love letter to the power of a community creating art.

American Classic | Season 1 | Our Town

When Slings & Arrows debuted on US television in 2005, it was hard to watch because its depiction of the chaos of creating theater—even as exaggerated and comical as it was—struck me as just too stressful and true to life (in the way I imagine some emergency room doctors and nurses must feel watching The Pitt). Now, on the 20th anniversary of its final season, I can revel in how Slings & Arrows celebrates the madness, the uncertainty, the frustrations, and ultimately the rewards to the soul of telling stories onstage. (It’s even instructive: I never understood exactly what Hamlet’s “reechy kisses” were until a funny sex scene in the second season featured the reechiest kiss I’ve ever seen.) Wherever it lands on all-time best-of lists, Slings & Arrows is undoubtedly the greatest television show ever made about the art and business of making theatre —especially Shakespeare—and American Classic is (so far anyway) its worthy successor.

Pro tip from Austin

Find Slings & Arrows at your library
(I found these DVDs at my local branch)

or, with a couple of clicks,
stream all 18 episodes on YouTube