Still growing in cult popularity, all three seasons of the Canadian dark comedy are well worth owning.
Set backstage at a mythical Shakespeare Festival, in a mythical Canadian town, New Burbage, this send up and homage to the famous Stratford Festival is a quiet riot.
The show's lead actors, like Martha Burns, Paul Gross, Susan Coyne and Stephen Ouimette (who made his Broadway debut in 2010). All have been real-life Stratford players. Gross played Hamlet, and Coyne played Juliet in Stratford productions.
This gem delivers the guts and the glory for all involved. Great, television. Give me more of these stories that go... "right through the ages with Shakespeare..." and raise the high water mark for the entire medium of television.
As a cure for fevered greed, Hollywood needs to take a seat on the living room couch and shut off the phones to study this one, because, obviously, audiences exist for shows that engage us with real story, three dimensional characters, and rarest of all - resonant dialog. That is dialog that reflects and echoes internal character arc as well as external action. Instead of slapping an audience across our dull-eyed faces with crude jokes, or non-stop violence and gimmickry.
Give me more.
By the middle of the second series I knew that-hard as it is to choose-my favorite character was the put-upon office, long suffering, manager/secretary, Anna Conroy, played with pitch-perfect sympathy by Susan Coyne; who ends up with most of the responsibility for daily operations at the New Burbage Theater Festival" and is the moral lynch-pin of the entire company. She walked into my hear quietly, slowly, barely noticeable at first, then, Bam!
Brava! More! More!
Set backstage at a mythical Shakespeare Festival, in a mythical Canadian town, New Burbage, this send up and homage to the famous Stratford Festival is a quiet riot.
The show's lead actors, like Martha Burns, Paul Gross, Susan Coyne and Stephen Ouimette (who made his Broadway debut in 2010). All have been real-life Stratford players. Gross played Hamlet, and Coyne played Juliet in Stratford productions.
This gem delivers the guts and the glory for all involved. Great, television. Give me more of these stories that go... "right through the ages with Shakespeare..." and raise the high water mark for the entire medium of television.
As a cure for fevered greed, Hollywood needs to take a seat on the living room couch and shut off the phones to study this one, because, obviously, audiences exist for shows that engage us with real story, three dimensional characters, and rarest of all - resonant dialog. That is dialog that reflects and echoes internal character arc as well as external action. Instead of slapping an audience across our dull-eyed faces with crude jokes, or non-stop violence and gimmickry.
Give me more.
By the middle of the second series I knew that-hard as it is to choose-my favorite character was the put-upon office, long suffering, manager/secretary, Anna Conroy, played with pitch-perfect sympathy by Susan Coyne; who ends up with most of the responsibility for daily operations at the New Burbage Theater Festival" and is the moral lynch-pin of the entire company. She walked into my hear quietly, slowly, barely noticeable at first, then, Bam!
Brava! More! More!