NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ontario -- The Shaw Festival is almost dead; long live the Shaw.

	If You Go: Shaw Festival Located in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, the Shaw Festival began its 43rd season in April and continues through Dec. 4. Tickets for 2005 go on sale to Shaw Festival members on Nov. 17 by mail, fax or online; on Nov. 27 by phone or in person. Some of the shows still running were reviewed in the Post-Gazette July 11. A 72-page festival handbook, including play descriptions, schedules of performances and other events and a guide to accommodation services, restaurants, wineries and other attractions is available from the Shaw Festival, Box 774, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada L0S 1J0; phone 1-800-511-7429; fax 1-905-468-3804; www.shawfest.com. Tickets (from the numbers above) vary according to theater, location, day of week and play. The range is Canadian $42 to $77 (US$31.50 to US$57.75), with some student and senior discounts. Festival Theatre (869 seats): Shaw, "Pygmalion" (through Nov. 27); Holm/Abbott, "Three Men on a Horse" (through Oct. 29); George F. Walker, "Nothing Sacred" (through Oct. 30). Royal George Theatre (328): Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest" (through Dec. 4); Rodgers, Hart and O'Hara, "Pal Joey" (through Oct. 30). Other events: backstage tours; pre-show chats every evening at Festival Theatre; Saturday Conversations; Tuesday Q&As following performances; Members Plus! Day (Saturday); Autumn Hostel (Oct. 20-22).

I exaggerate, of course. Canny Pittsburghers have long known that the lively theater festival just five hours drive to our north keeps running deep into the fall, and that autumn days can be gorgeous in this pretty little town on the shore of Lake Ontario.

All that's actually happened is that the festival has this weekend shuttered one of its three theaters, turning the intimate Court House Theatre back to the town to use as, of all things, a courthouse. But its two other theaters are still busy, keeping five of the season's 12 plays alive until (at the latest) Dec. 4.

And even better, word has just come of the bill of fare for the festival's 44th season, which will swing into action next April.

Wait till next year

In the 2005 playbill, just announced, artistic director Jackie Maxwell continues to nudge the Shaw gradually out of its focus on plays written or set in the century of its namesake's lifetime (1856-1950) and into bolder encounters with the present.

But the biggest surprise in 2005 will be a reduction from 12 shows to 10, doubtless a reaction to financial pressures due in good part to the decline in American tourism post-9/11.

Not unrelated is the biggest scheduling innovation, offering a musical on the stage of the main Festival Theatre -- and not just one of the vest-pocket shows that have long graced the small Royal George Theatre, but Broadway's own "Gypsy," with Maxwell herself directing. Before Shaw Fest purists sneer, they should realize that "Gypsy" is set in that magic century and it is also a small, character-driven drama closer to such Shaw Festival staples as William Inge, Arthur Miller and the British red-brick realists than to Broadway glamor.

Still, the heart of the Shaw is always its Shaws, and next year there will be two, the delightful family comedy "You Never Can Tell" and the timely exploration of armaments, money and morality, "Major Barbara."

There's a sort of sympathetic bond between socialist Shaw and the season's other musical, a remount of last year's "Happy End" by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. It will be joined at the Royal George by iconoclast director Neil Munro's version of Somerset Maugham's "The Constant Wife"; a lunchtime version of a Feydeau-Desvallire French farce; and Inge's "Bus Stop," directed by Maxwell.

There will be just three plays at the Court House: "Belle Moral: A Natural History," which is a new version of Canadian Ann-Marie MacDonald's early play, "The Arab's Mouth"; R.C. Sherriff's World War I classic, "Journey's End," directed by former Shaw artistic director Christopher Newton; and Lillian Hellman's "The Autumn Garden," directed by leading Canadian actress and CMU grad, Martha Henry.

Back to the present

The Shaw's current season continues right into December, but my mock mourning is somewhat justified in that several of the shows I liked best are among those just closed, as the capsule remarks below indicate.

As it happens, two of the shows continuing the longest -- "Pal Joey" and "The Importance of Being Earnest" -- are ones I didn't see, so I can't give you any critical guidance. But also continuing are John Cecil Holm and George Abbott's "Three Men on a Horse" and Shaw's "Pygmalion," both of which I reviewed in July. I found "Pygmalion" mildly disappointing, with Professor Higgins played like an angry Daddy Warbucks, but I loved "Three Men," a gem of a period American comedy, well worth a five-hour drive.

STAGE REVIEWS

George F. Walker (after Turgenev), "Nothing Sacred"

The Shaw's new mix of programming freedom with a continued care for its core century is neatly represented by "Nothing Sacred," which is both old and new. Although he starts with the central characters and situations of "Fathers and Sons," Ivan Turgenev's famous 1862 novel about generational clash, Walker creates his own play, still set in 1859 Russia at the time of the emancipation of the serfs, but pared down, with characters added and subtracted.

Walker is perhaps Canada's most produced playwright (and not just in Canada). So it's no surprise that the play's spare landscape, anxiety about national identity and varying pull of tradition and the new, particularly as it affects a father and son, all seem particularly Canadian -- though that may just be a way of saying that they transcend a particular time and place.

Director Morris Panych and designer Ken MacDonald break with tradition, starting the play with a full list of projected credits, like a movie. They set the action on a landscape inspired by the elegant, colorful abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky, hanging a strange sun over red hills in the daytime scenes, with abstract sculpture representing woods at night. The sets show an Asian influence, while much of the play feels like a post-modern "Waiting for Godot," its fading aristocrats and frustrated students clashing and wandering aimlessly, seeking direction and wondering what is to be done.

Of course, history will solve that indecision in the years ahead, but the characters don't yet know about Lenin or the Russian Revolution. This is the same emotional/historical terrain explored recently by Tom Stoppard in his epic "The Coast of Utopia."

The central figure, Turgenev's famous revolutionary-before-his-time, Bazarov, is a sort of exaggerated parody of a John Tanner-like Shavian realist. Mike Shara gives him all the offhand insolence you could wish for, but the most feeling performance is that by Jim Mezon as his progressive but timid and confused landowner father. Their scenes together and the stilted exchanges between the father and the young woman in whom the father is embarrassedly taking comfort -- these touch deep chords of empathy.

The fading aristocrats may be faintly comic, as in the case of Benedict Campbell's foppish Uncle Pavel, but their struggle to understand the tides of change earns them empathy points. "Nothing Sacred," its title referring to the play's historical moment as well as to Walker's treatment of Turgenev, is a perplexing business: To the extent it has a hero, he must be the one who dies, yet the play is a comedy.

Shaw, "Man and Superman"

This, one of Shaw's magisterial comedies about how nature uses us to fulfill her own plans, has just closed, along with the plays that follow, discussed briefly in descending order of the delight they gave.

"Man and Superman" doesn't give delight, exactly, but a thwacking good serving of energetic talk about the intersection between the inhibitions of society and the unruly energy of the "life force" -- what we'd call the sex drive, or whatever it is that gives the sex drive its moral and civilizing vigor.

It's a play the Shaw Fest returns to each decade, as well it should, and this version was distinguished by crisp, decor-free direction by the always interesting Neil Munro; an invigoratingly motor-mouthed performance by Ben Carlson of Tanner, Shaw's mouthpiece; and the inclusion at some performances of the play-within-the-play, "Don Juan in Hell," a squabble for four voices

I didn't get to see the latter, so I'll have to hope to stay around until the Shaw tackles it again. But in "Man and Superman" itself, Carlson was admirable, giving color and drive to the cascade of Shaw's language. And Munro's apparently perverse disregard for anything like a real set (just chairs, platforms and lights) set the play free to soar as the playful debate it is meant to be.

Terrence Rattigan, "Harlequinade"

What fun! This backstage comedy about an aging couple still touring as Romeo and Juliet is one familiar old joke about actors after another, brought to affectionate, rib-prodding life by the kind of capable, 15-strong cast that few theater companies could afford, and certainly not led by Goldie Semple and Peter Hutt. Eighty minute plays don't have much place nowadays, but this is one that shouldn't be lost.

Eugene O'Neill, "Ah, Wilderness!"

This, of course, will never be lost, since it holds the distinction of being the only comedy by the greatest American playwright. Though you may never have seen it, you would find it familiar enough, a nostalgic coming-of-age tale set in an archetypal turn-of-the-century New England town. Picture the cheery Act 1 of "Our Town," or Booth Tarkington with attitude; picture Andrew Wyeth without the intimations of death, or the Mark Twain Midwest without Jim. It's so charming, you suspect it of being wishful autobiography, which is just what it is, set in the same New London summer home O'Neill used later in his harrowing "Long Day's Journey Into Night."

Adam Guettel and Tina Landau, "Floyd Collins"

This intense account of the hopeful but foolhardy adventure of a 1930s Appalachian cave explorer and his bungled rescue made a big impact on me when I first saw it last year at Point Park College. But professionally produced, even with fine performances, it didn't impress as much; it even seemed that Floyd took an awful long time to die. Other members of the Post-Gazette theater tour, seeing it for the first time, were more moved than I. Clearly this is a strong, darkly tragic American musical, and I expect it will be a grim standard for years to come.

John Murrell, "Waiting for the Parade"

The drawback here wasn't in having already seen the play, but in not being a woman. That's what friends say, declaring it a play only a woman could love. Murrell follows a small group of them in Calgary through World War II, but although their pains, triumphs and small accommodations have undeniable truth, they never seem very dramatic. It feels like collage playmaking, not the real thing.

Tickets go on sale to groups on Jan. 3 and to the general public on Jan. 10 (mail, fax or online) and Jan. 15 (by phone or in person).