THE THEATER MIRROR, New England's LIVE Theater Guide
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Cricket's Notebook:
Most of you must know by now that I don't own a television-set (and, frankly, I don't miss it), but my computer is indeed equipped what in the old joke was called "a cup-holder" and among the extras on it is a DVD-Player program. Many months back, purely on a whim, I bought a "double-bill DVD of "ROYAL WEDDING" --- which is sublime whenever Fred Astaire is dancing --- and a perfectly abominable film called "THE PIED PIPER OF HAMLIN" in which Claude Raines attempts to be funny and a bad king at the same time and fails at both. But not long ago a friend who Has a t-v sent me a two-DVD setthat includes the "first season" --- i.e., six episodes --- of a wonderful Canadian series called "SLINGS & ARROWS" and I have fallen in love with it.
It's set backstage of the Swan Theatre in New Burbage that puts on a several-play season every year called their Shakespeare Festival. It opens opening night of "The Tempest" ("Your seventh, my tenth," says the Artistric Director to his old friend playing Titania), just as they're about to launch rehearsals of their "flagship production" for the season: "Hamlet". Just about everyone in the company seems tired, there's a Business Manager and a minx from their corporate sponsor who intend to "modernize" --- they've hired a young American film-star to play Hamlet who has no real stage experience --- and, of course, all hell breaks loose. It is both true and exaggerated, the acting is exquisite, and I am about to quote some of the gorgeous dialogue.
If you can find this show on American television, I recommend you try to see it, since the critical quotes on the box suggest that it can run for a couple years, if the creative teams involved can keep the level of work this high. I have no idea how my friend found the First Season box, but if you see it, Buy It!
But since you may not be able to do either, Let me run barefoot through these first six episodes and show you what you're missing:
After what must be a break for commercials we're shown the real locale of the show: The Swan Theatre --- a marble- and mural-swept mausoleum the size of our Colonial --- where The New Burbage Shakespeare Festival [Named for the fictitious town where it lives] is having an artistic crisis as dangerous as the financial one stalking Tennant's tinier company. It's opening night of the Festival's "Midsummer", everyone's on edge and arguing. Center-stage is their ageing, burnt-out Artistic Director Oliver Wells (played by Stephen Ouimette) doing his tenth "Dream" starring Ellen Fanshaw (Martha Burns) doing Titania for her sixth time and furious at being blocked to do a speech with her back to the audience.
A photo and some flashbacks show Ellen as Ophelia, Geoffry as Hamlet, and Oliver as their director. Hints reveal that this was an artistic triumph seven years before --- marred by Geoffrey going literally insane during the graveyard-scene in its third performance, when he ran from the theatre and ended his acting career.
The series' ingenue (Rachel McAdams playing an apprentice/fairy named Kate McNab) is introduced when the girl called Claire (playing Puck, badly, in "Dream") asks her "Your parents coming tonight?" to which "With the Chiefs in the playoffs? No way!" is the obvious reply. It is pretty clear that in this theatre filling The Empty Space with theatrical magic is less a joy than a strain.
But enter the villains: Richard Smith-Jones (Mark McKinney) is the bean-counting General Manager of the Festival, meeting an American fiend of a business-woman named Holly Day. Jennifer Irwin who plays Holly has a minx-ish grin on her blonde face, and has plans to use Richard in making radical changes that can grow the Festival into less an artistic than a business triumph. The pair bond like kindred souls. Her defining quote is "Change and opportunity are the same thing really, right?" His is a chiding: "Oliver, I wish you would try to think of this as a place of Business. Because that's what it is. A business." At one point Ellen demands "Oliver, when did you stop caring about the details? I haven't, because I'm one of those details!"
The show here becomes a montage of quick moments of an opening night, including a government bigwig's wife who, while he dozes beside her, listens to the hockey-game on her ear-plugged radio. At one point Oliver watches the show on closed-circuit with a South African, wearily moaning "There's not a moment of truth in any of it!" "Truth can be dangerous," is the reply: "We opened a play once and the police came and beat the actors with sticks." As they try to switch to the hockey-game there's news-footage of policemen arresting Geoffrey Tennant because the $12,600 personal check he had written for back rent bounced. "This reminds me of home," the Black man muses.
Visiting his cast, Oliver advises relaxing and remembering the words of Sir Ralph Richardson: "Acting is nothing more than trying to keep a large group of people from coughing."
The show ... little of it shown ... is pretty bad, and the cast heavily sedate themselves in the bar afterward. (Young Kate is visited by her beloved high-school acting teacher, who admits he hates kids and envies anyone who actually Acts for a living.) Oliver in his cups lists several great actors who were great drunks. "How could you Not drink? How could you face the world sober after living the perfection of a play? For Richard Burton, reality must have been incredibly boring."
About there Oliver remembers another opening (that "Hamlet" seven years before) when Geoffrey and Ellen and he got drunk enough to admit they all loved one another, and Geoff decided he wanted to make little baby imitations of her with Ellen --- wanted actually to marry her. Dead drunk, he tries to phone Geoffrey --- admitting Geoff getting arrested (for trying to save a theatre where no one comes to see the plays) was itself Real Theatre at last. He tries to face the ruin he has made of The Festival, and all their lives. He staggers from the phone-booth, falls unconscious into the street, and the camera pulls slowly up and back from him to reveal a huge semi-trailer bearing down on him, with a sign above its cab spelling
And that's where the episode ends. The series calls itself "A story in six parts."
Maybe I'll see if I can describe the other five; but don't wait up...
Love,
===Anon.
( a k a larry stark )
The show moves in three major streams through notification of the actors, a main-stage funeral, and the planning of Holly and Richard to take over the company and make him Artistic Director in this time of crisis ---and of "Change!" At first though, it focuses on young Kate, whose agent got her an audition for a cornflakes commercial --- she takes a bus to Toronto, even though she may be late to the evening's performance.
One of the un-credited actresses for the series is Susan Coyne, playing Anna Conroy in sensible heels and business dress, the efficient yet human assistant and maid-of-all-work who takes orders from both General Manager and Artistic Director while juggling problems left and right. She is actually one of the three-writer-team on the show. She is buffer between all these active ego's, and here she is magnificent at doing all her jobs while trying to keep in check her personal feelings. Whenever a problem arises, well, Anna will cope.
Holly, of course, sees everything as an opportunity to build her plans, using Richard as her tool. The worse the crisis, the bigger the triumph when he takes control. Oliver, dead, is merely an opportunity.
(Irrelevent note: as ther scene cuts from morgue to theater the background music is a softly dirge-like piano version of "Greensleaves" in a minor key. Lovely!)
There's a lovely sequence when the Mortimer Brothers prepare Oliver's faintly smiling face. They are a Laurel & Hardy duo, philosophically deep enough for Rich to wonder "Who'll do us when we go, Sam? Who'll do us?"
Kate's audition is a disaster, and her bus mired in a traffic-jam when the young man next to her asks "Are you an actress?" "An apprentice, really --- but I love it! What do you do?" Over his dark-glasses he smiles "I'm a movie star," to which she replies "Aren't we all?"
Ellen Fanshaw vacillates between morose brooding and uncontrollable sobbing, but takes a fancy to a young man delivering flowers, who saves her large chamelion from dehydration. (Oliver's gift to her.) The boy's name is "Sloan" but the actor's name didn't make the credits.
And one more collateral character: the grand lady Mae Silversgtone, chairman of The Board. Holly tells her to name Richard Artistic Director, quickly, so The Board hasn't time to think.
Kate rushes back to an empty theatre (Performance cancelled), she Got the commercial gig, and her roommate Claire (the awful actress, remember?) insists she do the shoot instead of Oliver's funeral. "It's great exposure --- and think of the money!"
Suddenly saying "I need to return a book" Geoffrey visits intending to leave his copy of "Hamlet" with the body --- when Oliver opens his eyes and bursts out "So this is what it takes to get you to drop by and say hello!" Geoffrey, remember, had been hospitalized as insane; he's both puzzled and sincere when Oliver whines "I didn't waste my life did I; near the end maybe, but I did move people, didn't I? Answer me! I'm talking to you from the other side for God's sake!"
Anna finds a letter "to be opened in case of my untimely death" and asks Geoff to deal with this request: to have his head removed and his skull preserved in the Festival props-room as Yorick's.
Geoff agrees to say a few words at the funeral --- where the first speaker says "Looks like Act I of 'The Boys from Syracuse' up here, doesn't it." (It does!)
Geoff reads a couple backstage anecdotes about Oliver from his "Hamlet" script, then:
"Oliver said a theatre is an empty box. It is our task to fill it with fury, ecstacy, and revolution! And for a time he did just that." But catching Ellen looking on from the wings he bursts out "But that's all gone to shit now," and, realizing this is not a time for truth he simply leaves the stage.
Leaves it to a last-minute preacher who launches into a homophobic diatribe against licentious theatre that only the Stage Manager's fire-alarm can stop.
And Mae tells The Board she's decided to give the Interim Artistic Director job to --- Geoffrey!
Kate says hello to that guy she met on the bus, and Claire reveals "That's Jack Crew, the American film star who's playing Hamlet!"
When Geoff tells Ellen he's the new A.D. she shoots back "You can't come back; you're insane." "Apparently that doesn't matter in the theatre." And when she points out that his Hamlet is good at martial-arts but has no serious stage experience, he quotes:
"And this, the whirligig of time, brings in his revenges..."
Curtain. [More]