The Stratford Shakespeare Festival has to be eager for a new season to take everybody's mind off the controversy that filled the winter months, and eventually landed in The New York Times. With the departure of Artistic Director Richard Monette after 14 years, the Festival appointed a general director and three - count ‘em, three - artistic directors. Not surprisingly, the troika soon turned to bickering, and two of its members left abruptly even though rehearsals had already begun.

The 2008 season combines what people expect from Stratford along with some surprising choices. What started as the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 1953 eventually expanded the range of its plays and dropped Shakespeare's name, even though his plays remained at the center of each year's lineup. The company always did at least three of them. General Manager Antoni Cimolino has now renamed it the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and has included five of Shakespeare's plays along with an outdoor theater piece - "Shakespeare's Universe: Her Infinite Variety" - that uses drama, song, and dance to illuminate the role of women in the plays.

For this first season with a restored name and new managers, which of Will's plays will it be? "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet," and "Taming of the Shrew" for starters - again! Stratford has fallen into the habit of often restaging the same best-known plays, perhaps because they're most likely to sell a lot of tickets. Their frequent repetition also encourages what some directors might call "new visions" of the plays, but theatergoers might call some of the results "self-indulgent" or "artsy-fartsy."

The schedule includes productions of two less familiar but challenging plays as well, the early "Love's Labour's Lost" and "All's Well That Ends Well" from the early 1600's. I'm especially fond of Shakespeare's comedies for their earthy humor, surprising darkness, ambiguous joy, and ultimate celebration of love. But the first of these plays mixes funny subplots with sophisticated wordplay and now-obscure literary allusions, and "All's Well That Ends Well," one of the problem plays, mixes fairy tale with cynicism. It's sometimes hard to know exactly what to make of them.

The highly regarded actor Brian Dennehy is in residence for part of the summer in two short plays that provide ambiguous and sometimes funny views of memory: Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" and Eugene O'Neill's "Hughie."

The innovations this year are striking. They include three classic plays from Ancient Greece, Germany, and Spain. First, a production of Euripedes' "The Trojan Women" from 415 B.C. that explores the capacity of women to endure in the face of suffering and loss, and, in the process, to take on tragic dimension. Of all the Greek tragic writers, Euripedes wrote with what seems to be a "modern" sensibility." For the first time, Stratford is mounting a work by Lope de Vega, the Spanish playwright who, believe it or not, wrote more than 1500 plays, of which 425 survive. "Fuente Overjuna" traces the uprising of villagers against a cruel military commander and their subsequent loyalty to one another. And last, there's a brief run of "Emilia Galotti" by the 18th century German playwright, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, to be performed by Deutsches Theater Berlin in German with projected English translations.

In addition to keeping classics alive, Stratford also serves up obvious crowd pleasers. This year, the two musicals are Meredith Willson's "The Music Man," and John Kander and Fred Ebb's "Cabaret." An enormously likable story of the lovable scoundrel, Harold Hill, "The Music Man" made Robert Preston and Barbara Cook into Broadway stars in 1957. The leads had better be good; there will be a lot of memories in the audience. "Cabaret," from 1962, is an early concept musical that traces the rise of Nazism in Germany through the way the songs inside the cabaret reflect what is happening in the larger world outside.

In addition, Simon Callow has designed a one-person performance piece based on Shakespeare's sonnets. "There Reigns Love" uses the poetry to reveal the writer's inner life - a particularly post-modern way to read a batch of 14-line love poems to draw debatable conclusions.

There has always seemed to be at the very least a professional truce between Stratford and The Shaw Festival, but lately Stratford has started poaching on Shaw's domain, last year in a deplorable production of Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" and this year with George Bernard Shaw's "Caesar and Cleopatra," Shaw's iconoclastic reading of ancient Roman history and the ever-contemporary battle of the sexes.

The new plays this year are an adaptation of Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" by Canadian playwright Morris Panych and the world premiere of Joanna McClelland Glass' "Palmer Park."

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival

Through November 9

Stratford, Ontario, Canada

Stratfordfestival.ca, 800-567-1600