2015 Summer Festivals—Shaw Festival, Caramoor, Bard Summerscape

Shaw Festival
Performances through November 1, 2015
Niagara on the Lake, Ontario, Canada
shawfest.com

Caramoor Summer Music Festival
Performances through August 2, 2015
Katonah, NY
caramoor.org

Bard Summerscape
Performances through August 16, 2015
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
fishercenter.bard.edu

Canada's Shaw Festival continues to be the premier summer theater destination, not only for its lovely lakeside location (whose cool breezes and usually moderate temperatures are the opposite of New York's sultry weather) but for its mostly superior productions of plays by Shaw and his contemporaries and—straying from the festival's original mandate—classic musicals and new plays by writers influenced by Bernard Shaw. 

Julie Martell (center) in Sweet Charity (photo: Emily Cooper)

This summer's musical, Sweet Charity, has two long shadows: it's based on Federico Fellini's classic 1956 film, The Nights of Cabiria, starring his beloved wife Giulietta Masina; and the original Broadway production, by Bob Fosse, starred his beloved wife Gwen Verdon. So that's four legends of film and theater towering over any production of this musical, which has a beguilingly tuneful score by Cy Coleman and an amusingly sassy book by Neil Simon.

Happily, multifaceted singer-dancer-actress Julie Martell brings her own mix of lovable naivete and hard-as-nails New York toughness to the lead role of Charity, and a large and merry cast surrounds her. Ken MacDonald's nicely evocative '60s New York sets, Cameron Davis's astute projections, Bonnie Beecher's lively lighting and Charlotte Dean's dead-on costumes complement the boisterous choreography of Parker Esse and solid direction by Morris Panych, which combine to make this Charity sweet indeed.

Harveen Sandhu (center) and Patrick McManus (right) in Pygmalion (photo: Emily Cooper)

The same cannot be said for a new production of Pygmalion, one of Bernard Shaw's supreme masterpieces that's best known as the basis of the beloved musical My Fair Lady. Shaw's biting satire of class warfare has been pointlessly updated to the present day by director Peter Hinton (who did similar damage to Oscar Wilde's Lady Windemere's Fan a couple of summers back), in the hopes that everyone "gets" that Shaw's 100-year-old play is still relevant today.

Well, of course it is, and we don't need Hinton's sledgehammer introductions of pontificating TV talking heads and other video footage, an extraneous fashion show—yes, you read that right— and lousy contemporary songs to alert us to that fact. (When Vaughan Williams' elegaic Tallis Fantasia is heard during a scene, the effect in this confused context is of sheer irrationality.) 

And, contrary to his published director's note, Hinton has "modernized" more than just dialogue about financial matters in order to push stodgy old Shaw into the 21st century. Whereas in the original, Eliza Doolittle famously used the expletive "bloody" to shock Shaw's upper-crust phonies, now she uses a more infamous F-word. It's good for an easy laugh—and feigned shock from an audience desensitized to hearing it by now—but little more. 

In such a farrago, the actors don't stand a chance: even experienced Shaw Fest vets like Patrick McManus and Mary Haney as Henry Higgins and his mother are defeated by their director; poor McManus even has to fight off a collapsing chair in a painfully unfunny bit of slapstick. For her part, Harveen Sandhu is everything you would want in an Eliza: maybe she'll get to play her again in a more felicitous production of Pygmalion.  

Dialogues des Carmélites: Jennifer Cheek, conductor Will Crutchfield, Alisa Jordheim (photo: Gabe Palacio)

From Canada to two musical oases north of the city, each staging opera this summer. Caramoor, an estate in Katonah, 45 minutes north of Manhattan, hosts a music festival each summer that includes classical, jazz and folk, along with two operas in the "Bel Canto at Caramoor" series. However, this summer—in addition to Donzietti's bel canto La Favorite—a mid-20th century masterpiece was performed: Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites.

It was a wise choice for the outdoor Venetian Theater: Poulenc's extraordinarily moving drama about a group of martyred nuns during the French Revolution was given a forceful reading by conductor Will Crutchfield and his skilled orchestral forces, choir and singers, led by the formidable Jennifer Cheek's young nun Blanche and Alisa Jordheim's breakout performance as the novice nun Constance.

Directed adroitly if minimally on the cramped stage by Victoria Crutchfield (the conductor's talented daughter), this Carmelites was involving musical drama of the highest order.

A scene from The Wreckers (photo: Cory Weaver)

Would that I could say the same about Ethel Smyth's middling The Wreckers, this summer's operatic offering at the annual must-attend Bard Summerscape, on Bard College's campus two hours north of New York. Smyth was a contemporary of Mexican composer Carlos Chavez, the subject of this summer's Bard Music Festival, which is why her 1908 opera—never before staged in America—was chosen, but a sketchy libretto and long, arid stretches of uninspired music drag it down.

Smyth's melodies are remindful of Wagner, Strauss and particularly Bizet and Carmen, but without reaching the emotional or dramatic heights of those masters. And director Thaddeus Strassberger forced the poor performers to navigate what looked like a precarious setup of crates that could at any moment send them tumbling into the orchestra pit. As it is, only soprano Sky Ingram made any vocal or dramatic impression in a cast that might have been more capable in more sympathetic circumstances. 

Leon Botstein ably conducted the American Symphony Orchestra, but the end result was indifference toward an operatic oddity with little to recommend it. Perhaps Chavez's only opera, The Visitors, should have been staged instead.

Theater Reviews—A.R. Gurney's 'The Wayside Motor Inn' & Shaw Festival 2014

The Wayside Motor Inn

Written by A.R. Gurney; directed by Lila Neugebauer

Performances through September 28, 2014

Signature Theatre Company, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY

signaturetheatre.org

Shaw Festival 2014

Arms and the Man

Written by Bernard Shaw

Cabaret

Music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur

Written by Tennessee Williams

When We Are Married

Written by J.B. Priestley

Performances through October 26, 2014

Niagara on the Lake, Canada

shawfest.com

Ismenia Mendes and David McElwee in The Wayside Motor Inn (photo: Joan Marcus)

A. R. Gurney, America's most civilized, genteel playwright, paints particular portraits, usually of society's upper crust, as in The Cocktail Hour or The Dining Room. His writing more recently became political, disgusted and alarmed as Gurney was over the Bush administration; I wonder if he will write anything about Obama. But much of his career has been one urbane work after another. It's no wonder that Love Letters—which consists of an actor and actress reading letters to each other—is being revived on Broadway this fall with rotating pairs of performers.

When his 1977 comedy-drama The Wayside Motor Inn premiered, it wasn't very well received, since it was more experimental than usual for Gurney: five unrelated stories about five pairs of regular (not affluent) people were played out near-simultaneously on the same set. And indeed, in the first act of director Lila Neugebauer's pleasing revival, there's a sense that, as the plots move forward in a sterile room in the title inn situated near Boston, not much happens in these quotidian lives on an ordinary day.

But, as the second act makes clear, Gurney's point is that there are no (or rare) grand epiphanies or intense dramas in our lives. The closest is a brief heart episode that Frank, sixty-ish husband to nagging wife Jesse, has when alone in the room, or when irate dad Vince tears teenage son Mark's favorite shirt when he refuses to wear a preppy pink one to the meeting Vince arranged for him with an important Harvard alum. 

Indeed, most of what happens is everyday, like college couple Phil and Sally trying to be alone together, or married traveling salesman Ray trying to talk inn employee Sharon (she of the wryly funny pronouncements about the horrible state of the world) into a date, or the escalating arguments betwwen divorcing husband Andy and wife Sharon when she stops by his room and discovers that he swiped beloved family photo albums.

Life goes on for these people, who may be a little wiser or worse for wear after a few hours holed up in this motel room: or maybe not. Either way, Gurney's play comprises typically elegant dialogue and construction, even if the multi-story conceit owes much to Alan Ayckbourn, who did much better by it in How the Other Half Lives, and makes similar ingenious sleights of hand far less gimmicky than Gurney does here. 

Still, director Neugebauer guides the busy stage traffic deftly, while Andrew Lieberman's exacting set and Kaye Voyce's vivid costumes take us right back to the late '70s. In a strong cast of ten, Ismenia Mendes etches a fiercely believable portrait of Sally's sexual confusion (Mendes is fast becoming, after Family Furniture and this, a go-to Gurney favorite), while Jenn Lyon makes a sexy, flirty Sharon.

Every summer, a trek to Niagara on the Lake is good for the soul. This idyllic country town is home to delectable wines made by award-winning wineries, along with housing the Shaw Festival: sampling the wines and attending plays (and, lately, musicals) performed by the best repertory acting troupe around are annual traditions I try not to miss.

Seeing several performances at Shaw allows one to watch the same performers splendidly enact different roles, whether comic, dramatic, farcical, tragic or musical. And so it is this year, starting with the exquisite Deborah Hay, who not only gives a remarkable portrayal of floozy chanteuse Sally Bowles in Peter Hinton's engrossing staging of Cabaret, but also sympathetically plays Dorothea, who is another Tennessee Williams attempt to reincarnate Blanche Dubois in his gauche one-act A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, this season's lunchtime presentation, staged rather toothlessly by director Blair Williams.

In Cabaret—whose obviously symbolic spiral staircase set by Michael Gianfrancesco is utilized to the hilt by director Hinton, at times to the show's detriment—the amazing Hay leads an array of accomplished actors like veterans Benedict Campbell as Herr Schultz and Corinne Koslo as Fraulein Schneider. In the seminal role of the Emcee, Juan Chioran copies neither Joel Grey nor Alan Cumming, instead coming up with an equally compelling interpretation of his own, with none of the excessive campiness that marred Cumming's return to the part on Broadway this spring. 

Attending the Shaw Festival leads to blissful discoveries. This season, it's J. B. Priestley's When We Are Married, an hilariously frenzied comedy (premiering in 1938) about three Yorkshire couples, married on the same day in the same chapel 25 years ago, finding out on their Silver Anniversary that they are not legal. These proper Victorians set about dealing with the possibility that they've been living in sin for a quarter-century in drolly humorous ways, while director Joseph Ziegler makes a masterly ringmaster in the Shaw's new production, which has a crackerjack cast led by Claire Jullien as one of the "wives" and Thom Marriott as one of the "husbands."

Jullien also appears in (and pretty much steals) a disappointing revival of Arms and the Man, Bernard Shaw's magisterial exploration of war and peace, both on the battlefield and the boudoir. Would that director Morris Panych didn't irrelevantly push this classic comedy toward farce, with unfelicitous results. But even in such a wayward production, Shaw's caustic humor and still-relevant observations remain a theatrical force to be reckoned with.

The Wayside Motor Inn
Signature Theatre Company, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
signaturetheatre.org

Shaw Festival 2014
Niagara on the Lake, Canada
shawfest.com

Shaw Festival 2013

Guys and Dolls
Music and lyrics by Frank Loesser
Lady Windermere’s Fan 
Written by Oscar Wilde
Our Betters 
Written by M. Somerset Maugham

Performances through November 3, 2013
Niagara on the Lake, Canada 
http://shawfest.com
 
The Shaw Festival—Behind the Curtain 
(PBS DVD)

At Canada’s eminent Shaw Festival, Bernard Shaw’s plays always receive pride of place—until this year. Only one Shaw play, Major Barbara, is being staged, along with an update of his Geneva to something called Peace in Our Time. I skipped both on my annual visit to the most picturesque small town in Canada, instead taking in a top-notch Oscar Wilde comedy, an obscure Somerset Maugham play and a great American musical. I (mostly) made the right choices.

Guys and Dolls (photo: David Cooper)

The musical, Guys and Dolls, is far more enjoyable than the recent Broadway revival. Most importantly, director Tadeusz Bradecki keeps the tough yet tender tone of Damon Runyon’s original New York stories—coupled with Frank Loesser’s first-rate, immediately hummable songs (like “Luck Be a Lady, “A Bushel and a Peck” and “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat”), this is a delightful production from start to finish, with a good cast in top form, highlighted by Jenny L. Wright’s hilarious yet vulnerable turn as Miss Adelaide. Her rendition of “Adelaide’s Lament” is the ultimate showstopper.

Lady Windermere's Fan (photo: David Cooper)

Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, subtitled A Play about a Good Woman, is so artfully crafted that one never realizes until the end how subtly it treats what seems an hackneyed theme: how gossip morphs into scandal, which was especially true in Wilde’s era. Why director Peter Hinton has cluttered such a sly, straightforward classic with unnecessary baggage like models posing as if in Whistler or Sargent paintings and epigrams written on curtains during scene changes or ludicrously blasting Katy Perry’s vapid pop song “Firework” as a coda is beyond my comprehension. Luckily, his largely compelling cast (Marla Mclean is especially lustrous as Lady Windermere and Tara Rosling splendidly scandalous as Mrs. Erlynne) does its utmost best to keep the play in our sights. For that, we (and Wilde) are grateful.

Our Betters (photo: David Cooper)

In Our Betters, a 1923 M. Somerset Maugham play receiving its first Shaw staging  (I’ve neither seen nor read it), Americans in England are a desperately social-climbing lot hoping to be taken seriously by their “betters”: the English men and women whom they want to impress, maybe even marry. Although it sounds farcical, Maugham has sympathy for these people, giving them a dignity amidst their flaws that would be missing from a nastier portrait. In director Morris Panych’s nicely-paced staging, Claire Jullien and Catherine McGregor—two of the festival’s best—give vivid portrayals of American women who have been in England so long they’ve come to accept their position. This bittersweet play is beautifully played.

For those who can’t get to the Shaw for enriching and entertaining theater (or for those who’d like a

souvenir of their visit), a new DVD, The Shaw Festival: Behind the Curtain, is not only a fine primer on the festival’s plays, theaters, and lovely Niagara on the Lake ambiance, but also an arresting demonstration of the rigor with which North America’s greatest repertory company develops its creative process for the dozen or so shows put on each season. Watching plays come to life in the hands of luminous performers as Moya O’Connell—whom I didn’t see in person this time around, alas—makes this well worth watching.

Shaw Festival 2013

Performances through November 3, 2013

Niagara on the Lake, Canada

http://shawfest.com

Theater Review: Shaw Festival 2012

French without Tears

Written by Terence Rattigan

Present Laughter

Written by Noel Coward

Misalliance

Written by Bernard Shaw

Performances through October 28, 2012

Niagara on the Lake, Canada

shawfest.com

At Canada’s eminent Shaw Festival, works by three great 20^th century British playwrights are being performed. Bernard Shaw, the festival’s namesake, has two plays onstage. I missed The Millionairess but saw Misalliance, along with one of the inimitable Noel Coward’s signature works, Present Laughter, and Terence Rattigan’s biting satire French Without Tears.

French without Tears (photo: David Cooper)

In French Without Tears—which ran for 1000-plus performances during its 1936 London premiere run—Rattigan hilariously targets young British men and women who go to France to learn the language. Instead of simply shooting fish in a barrel, however, Rattigan illuminates these people’s complexities: despite their foibles, they grow believably before our eyes.

In Kate Lynch’s breezy staging, Rattigan’s humor, humility and humanity come through, and the talented cast of ten provides equal amounts laughs and heartache, with the raised eyebrow that was Rattigan at his most formidable.

Present Laughter (photo: David Cooper)

Noel Coward wrote Present Laughter as a thinly veiled fictionalization of his own crazy celebrity life—matinee idol Garry Essendine is hounded by various men and women while being protected by his ex-wife as he tries to sort out his professional and personal difficulties before embarking on an African safari. Coward’s congenial wit can turn savage at times, but his characters all receive affectionate kicks in the pants, even alter ego Garry, skillfully played by Steven Sutcliffe with the right balance of bitchiness and pathos.

On William Schmuck’s wonderfully detailed set of Garry’s elegant home, director David Schurmann puts his talented cast through its paces admirably: next to Sutcliffe, best is Claire Jullien as Garry’s ex Liz, so sympathetic and levelheaded you wonder why he ever let her go.

Misalliance (photo: David Cooper)

A play about marriage, Misalliance also has as convoluted a plot as Shaw ever wrote. One afternoon on a wealthy family’s country estate, a Polish daredevil crashes her plane on the property, causing the men to make several marriage proposals to the various women gathered there. Considering the subject matter, moving time and place from 1909 to 1962 makes little sense except that it’s the year the Shaw Festival began.

Otherwise, Eda Holmes directs with brio on Judith Bowden’s evocative set, and Shaw’s pointed brickbats about socialism, poverty and relationships never pall. Holmes’ ensemble is superb separately and together, with Tara Rosling’s alluring pilot with the “unpronounceable” name, Lina Szczepanowska, and Catherine MacGregor’s tart Mrs. Tarleton standing out. As always at the Shaw Festival, the acting is as superlative as the writing.

The Shaw Festival @ 50

Heartbreak House
Candida
Written by Bernard Shaw
On the Rocks
A new version of Shaw’s play by Michael Healey
My Fair Lady
Music, lyrics & book by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner, based on Shaw’s play Pygmalion

Performances of Heartbreak House through October 7; On the Rocks through October 8; Candida through October 30; My Fair Lady through October 30
Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada
shawfest.ca


Since 1962, the annual Shaw Festival has consolidated its reputation as an unparalleled repertory company, presenting a dozen plays (and, more recently, musicals) by Shaw, his contemporaries and other writers.

Nestled in picturesque Niagara-on-the-Lake, one of Canada’s loveliest towns, the Shaw is a premier summer theater destination. And its current season is crammed with must-see works, including a trio of Shaw comedies and a classic musical based on a Shaw play.

Heartbreak House, one of Shaw’s supreme masterpieces, is a bitter, biting display of vitriol aimed at what the playwright perceived as Britain’s stupidity during World War I. In his obvious allegory about ignorant, deadly behavior, Shaw creates an arresting comic drama about clueless characters who, tellingly, are reluctant to admit their own moral failings.

Christopher Newton’s adroit staging brings out Shaw’s keen senses of humor and irony. Thanks to the usual excellent Shaw Fest ensemble, led by Michael Ball’s Captain Shotover and Benedict Campbell’s Boss Mangan, Shaw’s lacerating depiction of an empire in eclipse is vividly on display.

Too bad Leslie Frankish’s visually ingenious but heavy-handed set pointlessly literalizes Shaw’s description of the play’s setting as a rotting ship. And in Shaw’s astonishing final act, the house’s “hull” makes Shaw’s finely-tuned dialogue explicitly metaphorical instead of deeply probing.

On the Rocks, Shaw’s penultimate play, is an impenetrably dense anti-government screed with characters that are mere mouthpieces for the playwright’s unapologetically leftist politics. Canadian playwright Michael Healey has streamlined the play to make the dialogue more straightforward and the motivations of the British prime minister, associates and opponents more palatable. While the story moves faster and more succinctly, I have doubts about flip-flopping the action so the second act becomes a flashback to what occurs before intermission, but I guess it’s permissible to toy with lesser-known Shaw.

Joseph Ziegler’s staging works well enough on Christina Poddubiuk’s smart 10 Downing Street set, with the skillful comic cast giving its all to this prescient clash between conservative capitalism and utopian socialism. It would be instructive if the Festival presented Shaw’s original play, denseness and length be damned, but for now Healey’s version will do.

Candida, Shaw’s splendidly sophisticated chamber comedy about a minister and his wife whose relationship is complicated by the presence of an 18-year-old poet who adores her, is given an adequate if unilluminating revival by director Tadeusz Bradecki.

As Candida, Claire Jullien catches the subtle nuances of one of Shaw’s most charming, independent and intelligent female characters, but she’s the center of a lopsided trio: Wade Bogert-O’Brien overdoes the quirky teenage poet Marchbanks and Nigel Shawn Williams is a woefully unconvincing Reverend Morrell, whose speaking brilliance in the pulpit is at odds to his neediness at home.
An inspired musical choice this season, My Fair Lady is Lerner & Loewe’s masterly adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion about cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle and her stern mentor, the arrogant linguist Henry Higgins. The staging by directors Molly Smith and Paul Sportelli is sometimes too frantic, as if they wanted to ensure their spectacle would fill the large Festival Theater stage.

But the show itself (with classic songs ranging from “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” and “I Could Have Danced All Night” to “The Rain in Spain” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”) is foolproof, and the leads are performed with animated gusto and strong, clear voices by (above) terrific Deborah Hay and always astonishing Benedict Campbell (perhaps the most versatile of the Shaw’s talented troupe). My Fair Lady remains as indisputably great as the plays by the Festival’s namesake.

For those who want to take a piece of this memorable Festival home, the new coffee-table volume, The Shaw Festival: The First Fifty Years, is an indispensable trip down memory lane. Written by L.W. Conolly, the book recounts the Festival’s humble origins as “Salute to Shaw” in 1962 right to the 4-stage, 12-production, 6-month-long juggernaut it is now. The photos of the eminent actors and actresses who have graced the Shaw’s stages in the master’s plays over the past half-century are worth the price of admission by themselves.

Stratford and Shaw Festivals, Summer 2010

The Tempest 

Written by William Shakespeare 

Kiss Me, Kate 

Music & lyrics by Cole Porter, book by Sam and Bella Spewack 

(The Tempest through September 12; Kiss Me, Kate through October 30) 

Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Canada 

stratfordfestival.ca 

John Bull’s Other Island 

Written by Bernard Shaw 

The Doctor’s Dilemma 

Written by Bernard Shaw 

(John Bull's Other Island through October 9; The Doctor's Dilemma through October 30) 

Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada 

shawfest.com 

Summer in Canada has much to recommend it, notably more bearable weather than hot, sticky New York. But Canada’s best are its theater festivals at Niagara-on-the-Lake and Stratford, as excellent actors and inventive directors combine for top-notch productions of great plays by Shakespeare, Shaw and others—with a musical or two thrown in. 

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival gives preeminence to the greatest playwright in English (or any other language). And this summer’s star is our greatest living classical actor in English: Christopher Plummer unforgettably plays Prospero in The Tempest, and if Des McAnuff’s visually dazzling, sometimes too-clever staging doesn’t always let Shakespeare’s final masterpiece breathe, it at least lets Plummer—who enacted a monumental Caesar in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra on the same stage two summers ago—to crown a storied stage career.

Now a spry 80 years old, Plummer uses his lifetime of experience to plumb the depths of Shakespeare’s deposed duke turned magician on a magical isle with his teenaged daughter Miranda, orchestrating the play’s events to happen in his favor with the help of the sprite Ariel. 

If McAnuff’s staging drags during the usual overdone comic scenes featuring a drunken Trinculo and Stephano with the monstrous Caliban, there’s ample compensatory theatrical razzle-dazzle, including an enchanting opening image of Ariel descending to snatch Prospero’s magic book. 

The cast is not nearly on Plummer’s level, with Peter Hutt’s dull Alonso and Julyana Soelistyo’s disastrous Ariel on the lowest rung. But Plummer controls the stage throughout, whether reacting angrily as he recounts his banishment to Miranda or playfully aiding her courtship with Prince Ferdinand: here’s an actor in complete command of his resources and who, like his character, relies on them to do his stage magic. Plummer has the rare ability to speak Shakespeare’s lines so trippingly off the tongue as to sound like everyday speech. And his final speech to the audience is as unbearably moving as only a great actor can make it. 

Also at Stratford is Cole Porter’s classic musical Kiss Me Kate, based on Shakespeare’s early comedy The Taming of the Shrew. Happily, there’s little of director John Doyle's penchant for ruining musical theater works from Company to Peter Grimes. Porter’s songs, of course, are killers—“Wunderbar,” “So in Love,” “I Hate Men” and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” for starters—as are the women, led by firecracker Chilina Kennedy, who came from the Shaw Festival to become a star at Stratford with a booming voice and charm to spare. Likewise, there’s Monique Lund, a fabulously-talented comedienne with an operatic voice. Their leading men aren’t as memorable, but no matter: Kiss Me Kate is a keeper. 

The Shaw Festival’s two namesake plays this summer are rarely done in New York. Christopher Newton has staged John Bull’s Other Island as if it was a fairy tale. That’s not far off the mark: Shaw’s beguiling (if dated) comic drama is about an Englishman who goes to Ireland for the first time with his Irish business partner and falls for the charms of the Emerald Isle—including the Irishman’s former gal. Newton wittily uses British and Irish music by Vaughan Williams, Arnold and Harty, and his actors—led by Shaw vet Benedict Campbell, typically debonair as the Englishman—lead the way to a frolicsome, if ultimately frivolous, 2-1/2 hours in the theater. 

Uneasy laughs are plentiful in The Doctor's Dilemma, Shaw’s prescient black comedy about a doctor who must choose between two very different sick men to partake in a 

miraculous new treatment: a great artist who’s an awful human being or an elderly doctor as honest and humane as they come. 

Morris Panych’s production is hampered by the large Festival Theatre stage, which dwarfs the drawing-room intimacy of Shaw's philosophizing, and his “ironic” use of the Rolling Stones songs “Under My Thumb” and “You Can't Always get What You Want,” which smothers the beginning and end of each act. But the performances are top-notch, particularly Patrick Galligan as the perplexed physician and Michael Ball as his esteemed yet crusty colleague.