NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ontario -- Every year is pretty much the same in this little tourist Shangri-La just a half-hour north of Niagara Falls, but every year brings changes, too. There is a new nestle of shops springing up near the Royal George Theatre, and the Vintage Inns (four hotels and a restaurant) have been split between two owners -- big change in a community where three of those hotels are the biggest and poshest and tourism is big business.

	If you go: Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario Information: A large-format, 68-page festival booklet, including play descriptions, schedules of performances and other events and a visitors' guide to accommodation services, hotels, B&Bs, cottage rentals, restaurants, wineries, shopping 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. The Niagara-on-the-Lake Chamber of Commerce publishes its own visitors' guide and runs an accommodations service; 1-888-619-5981, 1-905-468-1950 or www.niagaraonthelake.com. Tickets (from above numbers) vary according to theater, location, day of week and play. The range is Canadian $42-$82 (U.S. $34-$66.40), with some shows discounted as low as $20 (U.S. $16.20) for students and $30 (U.S. $24.30) for seniors. "You Never Can Tell" (runs through Nov. 26) and "Gypsy" (through Oct. 30) are at the Festival Theatre. "The Constant Wife" (through Oct. 9) is at the Royal George. The Post-Gazette sponsors a theater tour to the Shaw Festival, Sept. 6-9. Call 412-441-3131 for details.

But the town remains as pretty and placid as ever, no matter what may be stirring within. The same is true at the Shaw Festival, with its three theaters and 10 plays and musicals running deep into November.

There have been deficits in recent years, as the Shaw settles in under a new artistic director and opens itself up to plays written outside the canonical period of 1857-1950 (Shaw's lifetime). The deficits are due less to this than to general Canadian tourist woes (post-SARS, post-9/11). There are rumbles that the deficits may require cutbacks. But the creative staff, acting company and this year's product remain strong.

On this first visit of 2005, I saw three of the eight plays already running, including one of my favorite Shaw comedies done with frothy, stylish polish. I saw a fine American musical given the sense of time and place that is a Shaw hallmark. And I saw a Somerset Maugham comedy that helps document his status as one of the 20th century's champions of women.

All three, it turns out, fit this year's accidental festival theme, an emphasis on the trials and strengths of family. More specifically, all three are variants of a familiar comic battle to free the next generation from the theoretic pedantries and personal obsessions of the generation before.

Shaw, "You Never Can Tell"

Shaw's early (1897) comedy is one of his most ebullient, centering on three unconventional children returning to England from being raised in the Colonies by a formidable mother, author of prescriptive progressive tracts on modern life.

She is no monster, this Mrs. Clandon; she has raised confident, capable children by herself, away from a father who she says was abusive. But while her by-the-book education has done little to curb the effervescent, charming behavior of her 18-year-old twins, Dolly and Philip, it has ill-prepared their older sister, Gloria, bred for feminist leadership, to withstand the amatory assault of a clever, personable and eligible young man, tellingly named Valentine.

And none of them is prepared for the accidental encounter, in the festive atmosphere of an English seaside resort hotel, with the husband/father rejected 18 years before. These encounters play out with the assistance of a family solicitor, a haughty barrister of eminence and, most important, an avuncular hotel waiter, one of the most delicious roles Shaw ever wrote.

And at the Shaw, it all plays out on a fanciful art nouveau set by Ken MacDonald. All swirling, sinuous line, it resembles a cross between a flower and a conch shell, glowing with beautiful translucent pastels -- a never-never-land out of nature, a purposeful contrast to the codes of Victorian social behavior enforced in even a holiday hotel.

Nancy Bryant's costumes balance sobriety and festivity, while Paul Mathiesen's lights gild the set with luminous magic and director Morris Panych finds surprisingly fitting musical enhancement in various Beatles tunes, which prove perfectly at home with high art nouveau.

In this, Shaw's most sprightly comic dramatization of the sexual imperative of the "life force," love conquers theory without working up even a mild sweat.

Ditto the Shaw pros. Imperturbable David Schurmann is a fine Waiter, not in the class of the greatest Waiter I ever saw, Ralph Richardson, but still the natural aristocrat, an eccentric Puck to carry out the playwright's schemes. Goldie Semple and Norman Browning make a crotchety estranged couple, and Mike Shara balances giddy and plausible in his Valentine.

But everyone most loves the irrepressible twins, played with verve and style by Nicole Underhay and Harry Judge. Who would not love this "You Never Can Tell"?

Jule Styne, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, "Gypsy"

Never before has the Shaw Festival put a big American musical on its main Festival Stage, that temple hitherto devoted to the intellectual turbulence of Shaw and his contemporaries. It reminds me of the Stratford Festival's taking a similar plunge, putting musicals on its great Shakespearean thrust. It's worked out well enough at Stratford, which suggests that the decision by Shaw artistic director Jackie Maxwell will turn out to have been a natural evolution, not a portent of desperation, as some purists believe.

Indeed, focusing as it does on the backstage theater world of the 1920s and 1930s, "Gypsy" (1959) proves to be right up the Shaw's power alley. This is a company that creates palpable atmosphere with the ease of long practice. In its hands, "Gypsy" is a rich period drama of personal frustration and development.

The story's kernel is really the same as in "You Never Can Tell" -- a domineering mother discovering that she cannot crimp her children's lives to her plan. The difference, though, is that while Mrs. Clandon is progressive, misguided and subsidiary, Mama Rose is regressive, obsessive and very much the star. This gives "Gypsy" the tragic weight of Rose's inevitable defeat as vaudeville dies and she sacrifices love to her need to control.

Balancing that is the smaller title tale, in which mousy Louise becomes the ironic, glittering Gypsy Rose Lee. But I'm not sure this production has that balance quite right. For all her ugly duckling beauty and appeal, Julie Martel's Louise doesn't register a triumph of the grandeur we want. And for all her ferocious energy, Nora McLellan's Rose doesn't dig as deep into her pain as the musical's grand emotional size could accommodate.

But it's a very good "Gypsy," strongly sung, with Ric Reid's rumpled Herbie to provide a comforting base. Director Maxwell knows the musical is really about, as she says in her program essay, "love, even at its most crazy or misguided."

Somerset Maugham, "The Constant Wife"

In a way, Maugham's placid comedy of marital infidelity fits a similar pattern. Here, the dogmatic pattern is the old double standard, represented again by the heroine's mother, by which the husband's infidelity, although no longer taken for granted, serves mainly to objectify his wife as victim. She, Constance, carves out a more radical path, ignoring his flaw with a calm that shocks her partisans, and when roused into action, assumes her right to a reciprocal extra-marital fling.

This doesn't have the shock it must have had in 1926, but even then, Maugham's urbanity and Constance's good-mannered self-control must have taken the sting out of it. Her bland surface never reveals the turmoil we assume bubbles within -- or that we would so assume if Maugham probed that deeply.

That he doesn't may be partly a result of his sympathy for women (why dig painfully into their internalized oppression?), but I think it has more to do with his personal discretion. If he was reluctant to make overt drama out of his own conflicted homosexuality, why should he explore others with a candor he denied himself?

Maugham does supply the witty banter of a lesser Noel Coward and a good deal of almost Shavian insight into the economic roots of personal morality. And he is a great gift to actresses, with juicy roles here for Laurie Paton (Constance), Patricia Hamilton (her mother), Catherine McGregor (her trendy young sister) and Glynis Rainey (the oblivious mistress).

Shaw stalwart, director Neil Munro, even adds a premonitory twist to the start of each act, focusing us more clearly on Constance's journey to self-assertion. This is no great neglected play, but it is a civilized period comedy of ideas.