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6 hours ago
5
Ah, the roar of the greasepaint – the smell of the crowd! Who doesn’t love the theatre? Or at least the idea of the theatre. Not the fact of the theatre – spending a fortune on a ticket, getting dressed up and going into town, either hungry or with too early a dinner inside you, trying to suspend enough disbelief to engage with Actors doing Big Acting in front of you when you’re too used to Small Acting watched from the sofa in front of a streaming platform. Then home too late to recover properly before bed.
It’s not just me. I know it isn’t.
But I defy even my fellow philistines not to fall in love, even if just a little bit, with American Classic, a new light comedy created and written by Michael Hoffman and Bob Martin. It follows the return of Richard Bean (Kevin Kline), once considered the future of American theatre (and now the subject of viral footage showing him drunkenly lambasting the New York Times critic for a bad review of his current performance in and as King Lear), to his small home town of Millersburg after his mother’s unexpected death. His brother Jon (Jon Tenney) broke the news about his mum. “Did she read the review?” replied Richard. Fortunately, Jon knows his brother is an actor and one suspects long ago made the decision to love him anyway.
Jon has stayed in Millersburg with his wife, Kristen (Laura Linney), taking care of the boys’ father Linus (Len Cariou), who is now in the early-plus stages of dementia. Together, they also look after the other remaining member of the family – the Millersburg Festival Theater, established by the Beans and where Richard learned the fundamentals of his craft. The modern small-town economy being what it is, however, means – Richard is horrified to learn – that it now stages dinner theatre rather than original production. Jon is the chef, daughter Miranda is a waitress (though dreaming, naturally, of becoming an actor in New York), and Kristen is everything else. She is also mayor of the town (which includes the adjudication of the Concerned Parents’ Bookburning Summit) because a Laura Linney character’s work is almost never done.
Richard packs his bags in disgust, planning to leave even before the funeral, until his agent Alvy (Tony Shalhoub, having the time of his life, as all actors do when allowed to play an agent) reminds him that he’s “still a meme” and needs to keep his head down. So he pivots to planning the funeral at the theatre instead. The rehearsals become extravagant. Jon points out the ludicrousness. “I’m sacrificing everything for cheap spectacle,” realises Richard. “I’m not trusting the material.”
The line is pure Richard, the underlying truth pure beauty. You may not have fog machines and a lighting rig to play with, but who hasn’t got caught up in the fervent need, born of grief, to make everyone know how much a person meant and meant to you? And what do you have to do in the end but trust the material – trust the memories, trust the love in the room, trust the common humanity of everyone.
This is what American Classic is really all about. Richard (because he remains himself, though Kline always tempers his narcissism with enough – eventual – self-awareness to keep us on side) announces at the end of the eulogy that he is going to restore the theatre’s fortunes by “producing, directing … possibly even starring in” Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town. Beneath the comedy of small-town manners, Hoffman/Martin’s show becomes a meditation on … God, it’s going to make me say it, I think … the power of art. Not a laboured one – the story and the people and the jokes come first, especially once casting starts – but a sweet and moving one. It’s made all the more touching by the authentic belief in that power, which suffuses the series, stacked as it (presumably deliberately) is with actors known at least as much in their native US for their stage work as for their film and television careers.
American Classic’s combination of charm, wit and tenderness – and especially the encouragement to forgive ordinary human frailties – is reminiscent of Ted Lasso and Schitt’s Creek. Its retro-tropes can take us all the way back to plucky young Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland putting the show on right here. Just as those endeavours took audiences’ minds off the pandemic, Trump #1 and World War #2 respectively, American Classic will doubtless offer its own comfort now.
You could object, as you could with Lasso and the Creek, to the fact that there is nothing wildly new here, but that would be to miss the point. Recombinant delights are how we know ourselves, how a society remains bound. The only duty is to recombine things well, to keep them fresh and funny as well as comforting, and it’s fully discharged here over eight swift, sure and never-too-schmaltzy episodes.
Goddammit. Maybe the play is the thing.
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American Classic is on MGM+
