It sounds a little like a double-play combination - Wilde to Coward to Shaw. Except the Shaw Festival has benched Oscar for the 2009 season, given Bernard a limited number of at-bats, and announced that Noel will be hitting cleanup. Eugene O'Neill, Garson Kanin, John Osborne, and Stephen Sondheim provide a strong bench and - thank goodness! - bring this baseball metaphor to an end.

Yet like baseball, the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, is, for its devotees, one of the ne plus ultras of summer, along with NOTL's porches and terraces for dining al fresco, its explosion of color from the flower beds that overflow the sidewalks, and its unending procession of ice-cream cone munchers and visitors on a fudge fix. No one ever died on Queen Street from a shortfall of sweets, and that takes us to the Shaw Festival's 2009 season, the 47th go-round of plays from what former artistic director Christopher Newton called "the birth of the modern world" - the long lifetime of George Bernard Shaw.

Even though Shaw is the Festival's namesake and two of his plays are on view this summer, Coward is the star attraction. Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell has chosen to mount the complete "Tonight at 8:30," a collection of 10 one-act plays that Coward finished in 1936 so he and Gertrude Lawrence could act in them together. Alas, Gertie and Noel are no longer with us to play in that brittle, artificial style Coward wrote for, and that they handled with such aplomb in the popular West End plays of the 20's and 30's. Now and then, a theater revives one or another of the plays - usually "Still Life," made into a 1945 British movie called "Brief Encounter," about an affair between two married people who meet accidentally as they wait for different trains - but almost never do you see all of them with comedy, domestic drama, musical, and even tragedy piling one on top of the other. It will take four stops to see all 10, under the titles, "Brief Encounters," "Ways of the Heart," "Play, Orchestra, Play," and, as the lunchtime show, "Star Chamber."

The first of Shaw's two plays, "The Devil's Disciple," is his irreverent take on the American Revolution. Its first production in 1897 was so successful that he was able to quit his day job and devote himself to writing. My caveat: director Tadeusz Bradecki's productions are usually more about his "vision" than the play he's supposed to be directing. "In Good King Charles's Golden Days" is a classic example of a "what if" play as King Charles II, Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of the Quakers, and a leading portrait painter of the day sit around the king's table to discuss all the things that mattered to Shaw. Fortunately, he remembered to have several of the king's mistresses interrupt from time to time, and he also remembered to make the play very, very funny.

What remains are plays from different strains of 20th century British and American drama:

-Eugene O'Neill's "A Moon for the Misbegotten," generally seen as a sequel to "Long Day's Journey into Night," and a surprisingly romantic play for someone as dark as O'Neill;

-Garson Kanin's "Born Yesterday," the classic 1946 Broadway comedy about the quintessential "dumb blonde" who ain't so dumb after all;

-John Osborne's "The Entertainer" from 1957, a searing look at a third-rate vaudevillian set in an enervated post-War England by the most important of the Angry Young Men.

The annual musical returns to the tiny stage of the Royal George Theatre, so it will be interesting to see if Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George" works as a chamber musical. The brilliant first act is about the making of Georges Seurat's famous pointillist painting, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte." It is also about the thoughts and feelings of Seurat and his mistress, Dot, and their often stormy (and funny) love affair. As for the second act, set in the present, you get to join those who love it or those who hate it. The only requirement is that you sit through it.

Finally, the Festival introduces French-Canadian playwright Michel Tremblay to an audience that's partly American in a translation of "Albertine in Five Times," originally written in French. After J.B. Priestley played with time in last season's "An Inspector Calls," this year Tremblay gives Albertine the chance to meet herself at five different times in her life. She's 30 and 70 and three ages in between, and she apparently loves to talk about what she's going through, going through, going through, going through, and going through.

2009 Shaw Festival

Through November 1

Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada

800-511-SHAW, shawfest.com