American Classic’s Theatrical DNA is Its Pedigree

Nestled quietly in a corner of the MGM+ streamer, a service that rarely gets invoked when the streaming giants are under discussion, lies the answer to anyone who has wondered for the past 20 years, as I have, “Why can’t we have another series like ‘Slings and Arrows?’”

“Slings,” for those not fortunate enough to have encountered it over the decades, was a Canadian series which tiptoed into the American market quietly one summer in the mid-aughts. It followed the goings on at a theatre festival in Canada that was fairly obviously modeled on the august Stratford Festival, telling intertwined, lightly comic stories of the longtime company members and leaders, linking the offstage business of the festival with the process of mounting several productions, mostly Shakespeare, amidst personal and professional travails.

It was all told with a sense of Canadian niceness as there were no villains, just people sometimes at cross purposes, all theatre besotted, splashed with a dollop of out and out fantasy. I fell for it hard only minutes into the first episode when the festival’s manager was enmeshed in a discussion about corporate sponsors, an aspect of my professional life which I had never seen portrayed in fiction. Each six-episode season concluded with scenes from the shows we’d watched in rehearsal, culminating in its third and final year with a heartbreaking “King Lear” essayed by the great Canadian stage stalwart William Hutt.

Now MGM+ plus brings us “American Classic,” about a renowned Broadway and film actor, Richard Bean, who retreats to his family’s small-town theatre after a viral scandal (a kerfuffle with the New York Times theatre critic over a negative review) to lick his wounds. Long-absent, Richard discovers that the once ambitious Millersburg Festival Theatre has devolved, under the aegis of his brother Jon and Jon’s wife Kristen, into a dinner theatre subsisting on touring productions like “Nunsense” to keep the lights on. His mother has just died, his father is slowly creeping into dementia, his niece dreams of a theatre life in NYC, and Kristen, who doubles as the town’s mayor, happens to be a former acting and romantic partner of Richard. His solution to his own professional crisis and theatre’s? To stage the greatest production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” that anyone has ever seen, complete with a real horse and rain on stage.

Where the “Slings and Arrows” DNA presents itself most squarely is in the writing of the series: Bob Martin, before he became a go-to Broadway bookwriter (also known as Broadway’s original Man in Chair in “The Drowsy Chaperone”) was one-third of the creative and writing team of “Slings” and he co-wrote “Classic” with the show’s director, Michael Hoffman. The first season, which leaves an obvious opening for more yet to come, follows the “Slings” template somewhat closely, although I suppose most backstage stories work like this: all manner of challenges befall a production leading up to it all coming together on opening night, whether in travesty or triumph. Given Martin’s role here, I doubt it’s an accident that “Slings” ended with “Lear” and “Classic” opens with it, albeit a very different take.

Like “Slings,” “American Classic” tempers its affection and satire of the theatre and the people who make it with more grounded concerns – how the theatre is struggling to stay afloat under the burden of a mortgage on the property, the financial downturn that has been hollowing out its hometown, the rapacious developer dangling economic salvation in the form of a casino development. Yes, this is a simplified and somewhat fantasy laden view of theatre, but there are some real-world consequences here that aren’t played just for laughs, which show how desperation can motivate and blind people to the impact they’ll have on others. No one could mistake “Classic” for a documentary, yet it’s not “Noises Off” either.

The show is a potpourri of theatre talent, with guest appearances and supporting roles filled out by such figures as Jessica Hecht, Len Cariou, Billy Eugene Jones (of the most recent “Our Town” Broadway revival), Stephen Spinella, Aaron Tveit, Tony Shalhoub, Mark Linn-Baker, and ever-so-briefly Jane Alexander, among others. The lead triumvirate are Laura Linney, Jon Tenney and as Richard, Kevin Kline. Kline’s role, as the vainglorious Richard, is of a piece with many roles he’s played before, having perfected theatrical pomposity as Bruce Granit in “On The 20th Century,” reprised it as Gary Essendine in “Present Laughter” and, under the direction of the aforementioned Michael Hoffman, played similar characters in the films “Soapdish” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Save that he is perhaps a bit old to play Len Cariou’s son or to have appeared as George to Laura Linney’s Emily in an earlier “Our Town,” Kline’s own resume – his professional DNA –underpins his performance with a roster of precursors.

Fictional TV series about theatre only come along once in a decade or so – the gap between “Slings and Arrows” and “American Classic” was filled by the much-hyped network series “Smash,” which lasted two soapy, production number-laden seasons and – what do you know – came to Broadway as a full-fledged musical with a book co-written by Bob Martin, another link of the DNA chain at play here. For those of us who love the theatre deeply or work inside of it (with plenty of folks doing both) we hope that TV depictions might serve to inspire others to comparable affection and interest, so we pin our hopes and dreams on each iteration, thinking that each might vault theatre into the same popular currency as sports and movies and their like.

With its gentle whimsy, “American Classic” may not serve as a tool for evangelizing about the theatre, but even when it’s spoofing it and its plot has moments of absurdity, there is absolute respect for what theatre can bring to individual people and even to whole communities, a message always welcome. Now that Kline’s character has come down a bit off his pedestal over the course of season 1 and with the fate of the Millersburg Festival Theatre still hanging in the balance, the obvious set-up to season 2 is dangling and awaiting more exploration. There are other American classics to be undertaken by “American Classic,” so here’s hoping for another season of banishing “Nunsense” and enshrining The Beans as The Royal Family, as the Barrymores, of Millersburg.

Photos courtesy of MGM+