It's easy for a small town with a big summer festival to be overwhelmed by celebratory shenanigans. But Niagara-on-the-Lake, the Ontario village that hosts the Shaw Festival, does a pretty good job of maintaining its equilibrium, helped along by the fact that its festivities require people to sit quietly in the dark and pay attention. Despite the tour buses that lumber into town, the town remains awash in flowers and inundated by ice cream cones (and their devourers). The Irish Shop can drown you in pricey tweeds and herringbones while The Epicurean seduces you with cold peach soup on a hot day. Most important, though, the theater, with only occasional slips, is some of the finest you'll see this side of London's West End. The new season - the 47th - looks first rate on paper.

First and foremost, there's George Bernard Shaw, himself - cranky, irreverent, and everlastingly witty, bubbling with his own peculiar bonhomie and an unequalled gift for dramatic gab. The Festival limits itself to plays by Shaw and his contemporaries, as well as later plays set during his long lifetime, 1856-1950.

One of Modernism's most appealing founding fathers, Shaw often combined views of women, sex, power, and money in an ambiguous moral stew of his own making. He never did it more brilliantly than in "Mrs. Warren's Profession," or more rambunctiously than in "Getting Married," one of those delightful Shavian exercises in which everybody gets to have an uncommonly articulate say, and almost everybody ends up looking like a fool, at least for a while.

Nearly 20 years ago, the Festival began a series of revivals by the long-neglected English playwright and novelist, J.B. Priestley. Now, eight years after its last Priestley production, the Festival is returning to one of his best and trickiest plays, "An Inspector Calls." A master of popular forms, Priestley was especially adept at writing a "mystery" that becomes much more before it ends. Is anything as irresistible as guilty secrets?

If the season has a darker play than "An Inspector Calls," it's "The Little Foxes," Lillian Hellman's Gothic melodrama about a lethally decadent Southern family that specializes in devouring one another, and whose script often encourages actors to devour large portions of the scenery as well. I wanted to write that its evil heroine is "deliciously treacherous," but the Shaw's promo for the play beat me to it.

For those enamored of musicals, the three this summer give you a good sense of what's happened to the American musical over the last half century. "WonderfulTown" tells the comic story of Eileen and Ruth Sherwood's move from a small town in Ohio to a small town in New York named Greenwich Village. Ruth wants to be a writer and Eileen is adorable. It was originally a series of 1938 New Yorker short stories by Ruth McKinney, then a play and movie, both entitled "My Sister Eileen," and then it was Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green's second collaboration. The gently satiric view of New York City is pure Comden and Green; it's gruff and tough but its heart is pure, and the score is charming. "Why, oh why, oh why, oh -," Ruth and Eileen sing as the thunder crashes around them on their first terrifying night alone in the City, "Why did I ever leave Ohio?" Fear not, they learn to love Manhattan.

Thirty years later, Stephen Sondheim embraced the idea of a tour de force by adapting Ingmar Bergman's "Smiles of a Summer Night" into "A Little Night Music," a musical in which all the music is in 3/4 time. Even if a song isn't a waltz, it feels as if it is. Sondheim lengthens song forms into recitative, shows off his wit, and writes his one standard, "Send in the Clowns." ALNM is actually a very fragile piece. In the right hands, it's exquisite - but only in the right hands.

The third musical is one of my personal favorites. "Follies" is Sondheim's dark tribute to classic American popular song and early musicals. This two-hour pastiche receives four concert-style performances in late summer.

The remaining plays are less well known to a broad public but give The Shaw a chance to do something it has done successfully over the years: give forgotten plays a good airing. Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell, now in her sixth year, is also interested in overlooked women writers. She interweaves both threads in Githa Sowerby's "The Stepmother" from 1924. Terence Rattigan's "After the Dance" virtually disappeared after its premiere run in 1939, but has gotten attention lately as one of those "lost masterpieces" you may want to be wary of - except that Rattigan is always worth a chance. Morwyn Brebner ("The President," adapted from a comedy by Ferenc Molnar) and Anne-Marie MacDonald ("Belle Moral," which had a successful run at Shaw in 2005) are contemporary Canadian playwrights.

For tickets, or for a brochure with information about plays, schedules, lodging, dining, and other area attractions, call 1-800-511-SHAW or use the Festival's website, shawfest.com. 

2008 Shaw Festival

Through November 2

Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada

800-511-SHAW, shawfest.com