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When Oliver Welles, the longstanding artistic director of the prestigious, financially successful—if somewhat artistically bankrupt—New Burbage Shakespearean Festival, has a sudden and tragic meeting with a “Canada’s Best Hams” truck, the Festival must appoint a new Acting Artistic Director pronto. Geoffrey Tennant, a former rising star in the Festival until he had a nervous breakdown onstage seven years earlier, shows up at the funeral to give a blistering speech about artistic integrity, and is promptly tapped for the job. His first assignment? To direct “Hamlet,” the play that was his undoing. 

As if that wasn’t enough, Tennant must cope with a clueless ingénue whose idea of character development is getting high to gain insight into Ophelia’s madness; a movie-star, Method-acting leading man who insists on speaking Hamlet’s lines in modern slang; an old girlfriend who swans around as if she owns the place;  a rapacious corporate sponsor with a scheme to turn the Festival into a theatrical amusement park…oh, and the ghost of Oliver Welles, Tennant’s late mentor and nemesis, who has the unnerving habit of popping up, visible only to Tennant, to weigh in with his own caustically expressed opinions about the Festival, the performance, and his increasingly unhinged successor.

The series teems with stellar performances: Paul Gross (of “Due South” and “Passchendaele”) is wry and intelligent and compassionate and juuuuust a little bit crazy as Acting Artistic Director Geoffrey Tenant. Martha Burns, Gross’s real life spouse, and real-life Stratford Shakespeare Festival alum, gets her diva on as Ellen Fanshawe, the company’s perennial leading lady (and terrible kvetch). And former Kid in the Hall Mark McKinney, playing the craven, revenue-obsessed Festival manager, Richard Smith-Jones, dithers delightfully between good—well, sort of good—and evil.

Slings and Arrows is poignant, hysterically funny, well-written, and fabulously-acted, with a great ensemble cast. You don’t have to be familiar with Shakespeare to appreciate the show’s perfect balance of human drama and slapstick humour, but aficionados of the Bard will also find much to savour, and anyone who’s ever been involved with the arts will nod in rueful recognition at  the continual tug-of-war between art and commerce that pulls at everyone in the company, from the Board down to the newest apprentice. With only three seasons of six episodes each, this series will leave you wanting more.