Title: And go to't with delight
Fandom: Slings & Arrows
Length: 300
Characters: Richard Smith-Jones, mentions of others
Content notes: no warnings apply
Author note: title from Antony and Cleopatra, quoted in 25 Shakespeare quotations for fundraisers, a blogpost entry I feel Richard would approve of
Summary: If Geoffrey Tennant gives you a gift horse, you’d better look it in the mouth and everywhere else.



Being involved every step of the way in staging a new musical sounded like a dream come true. That right there should have warned Richard not to believe it. If Geoffrey Tennant gives you a gift horse, you’d better look it in the mouth and everywhere else. Richard wonders if it’s even true that Geoffrey hates musicals, or if he only claimed that in order to kill two birds with one stone: get out of working with Darren Nichols and soften Richard up for the news that he’d cast Charles Kingman as Lear.

Geoffrey’s Lear is even more of a disaster than Richard could have imagined: never in the history of New Burbage has a show had not one but two cancelled openings. Only the triumph of East Hastings – thanks of course to Richard’s crucial intervention – saves the whole season from being a write-off. As it is, Geoffrey gets fired, not before time, and Richard hires a new Artistic Director who actually seems to understand about box office. Darren scrubs up well once he stops wearing those ridiculous outfits, and has the Board eating out of his hand within minutes.

A few of the company and crew leave New Burbage and follow Geoffrey to Montreal: Maria, Nahum, Frank and Cyril. No great loss, any of them. It’s a pity about Anna, but she’s obviously having some kind of midlife crisis anyway, running off to Bolivia like that. Richard’s far too busy making plans for his directorial debut with Oklahoma to concern himself with minor changes in personnel. With him at the helm and Darren as Artistic Director, New Burbage’s future looks rosy.

It goes on looking rosy right up until that incident with the lasers, which was so not Richard’s fault. Sadly for him, the Board takes a different view.