Hitting all of its marks

Sunday night, the Sundance Channel begins a second season of the Canadian miniseries “Slings & Arrows,” a backstage comedy set at a beleaguered fictional theater festival. The first season -- which might, like this, more properly be called a miniseries, so inextricably intertwined are its plots and subplots, and so cohesively do its parts bend toward a common conclusion -- was romantic, deep, charming, sweet, satirical, thrilling, funny and, at the same time, understated. (A Canadian virtue, perhaps.) The sequel does not disappoint.

We begin where we left off, as the New Burbage Theater Festival production of “Hamlet,” whose staging was the matter of Season 1, comes to a close. (The first series replays Saturday as a six-hour marathon; it’s worth seeing it first.) The current run tackles the famously cursed “Macbeth,” whose name it is bad luck to speak. Like “Hamlet,” the play has a ghost in it -- appropriate, since “Slings & Arrows” is, among other things, a ghost story, though more in the tradition of “Topper” than of, say, “The Turn of the Screw” or “Poltergeist.”

All the world may be a stage and all the men and women only players, but the ones who do it for a living are a breed apart from the rest of us, with bigger voices and thinner skin. Most of the characters here are (at least) fairly neurotic and self-obsessed but somehow are no less attractive for it. But, again perhaps in the national character, they are also fundamentally polite -- endlessly saying “sorry,” with their adorable Canadian long o’s.

Once again, artistic director Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross, known here for the Mountie series “Due South”) is beset by the shade of his late predecessor, Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette), with whom he finds himself in nerve-racking collaboration. And once again, in the vein of “Twentieth Century” or “Kiss Me Kate,” he is in love and at war with flickering old flame and company diva Ellen Fanshaw (Martha Burns, who is married to Gross).

Joining them this season are Henry Breedlove (Geraint Wyn Davies), a pompous stage star; a new ingenue and juvenile (Joanne Kelley and David Alpay); Colm Feore as an advertising executive re-branding the festival; and Grace Lynn Kung as an overeager, overemotional intern.

Among the many returning characters are two of the series’ screenwriters -- Mark McKinney of “Kids in the Hall” and playwright-actress Susan Coyne -- as the festival’s general manager and his executive assistant. (Third writing partner Bob Martin, long associated with Second City Toronto, is co-author with Don McKellar of the musical “The Drowsy Chaperone,” which played here last fall on its way to Broadway.)

Also back are pretentious director Darren Nichols (McKellar), running a joyless production of “Romeo and Juliet”; Catherine Fitch as the put-upon stage manager; Matt Fitzgerald as Ellen’s sweet, dumb, younger motocross-rider boyfriend; and Rothaford Grey as the festival’s maintenance man/security guard, an expatriate Nigerian theater director full of canny observations.

Indeed, one pleasure of the series is its intelligent dramaturgy. Shakespeare is, among other things, a puzzle to solve, and the solutions offered in these stagings -- they may not be original, of course -- hold water. There’s a kind of educational side to the action, and the whole production has the authority of having been made by people who know their business, who have lived this life and played these parts. Many in the cast are veterans of the Stratford Festival, upon which New Burbage is modeled. (Ouimette is, in fact, its associate director.) Many have worked together there or elsewhere, Canada being a small country, or rather a big country with relatively few people in it.

There are a few parallels to “Macbeth” worked in -- there’s “a witch,” anyway, briefly. And the pair of old gay actors played by Graham Harley and Michael Polley may be seen as Shakespearean clowns, been-around philosophers who comment on the fray they’re now above. More to the point, much of the series’ gathering force comes from the fact that they’re acting Shakespeare and not, say, Neil Simon, or even G.B. Shaw. The elegant swing of his iambic pentameter, the life-and-death subject matter and its almost mythic power draw you in, so that by its climax “Slings & Arrows” is running at a high pitch not only of comic excitement but also of raw emotion.

Even at six hours, it’s over too soon. Good news, then, that a third season, reportedly centered on “King Lear,” is in the pipeline.

*

‘Slings & Arrows’

Where: Sundance Channel

When: Season 2, 9 p.m. Sunday; Season 1 plays in its entirety beginning at 3 p.m. Saturday.

Rating: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14)