The Shaw Festival's roster of plays for 2011 looks like any other recent season, but for some reason it feels hard to get excited about most of Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell's decisions even though this is the Shaw's 50th anniversary season. There's the usual mix of plays by George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries, a couple of musicals, and two current plays that have become part of Maxwell's approach to programming even if they have little to do with the festival's mandate. Yet most of the choices feel more-or-less perfunctory, although some of them do raise a question or two.

The three plays by Shaw this summer include "Candida," Shaw's entertaining take on love and marriage, and the monumental "Heartbreak House," a difficult play for actors, directors, and audiences alike. Written in 1919, it's a long, brilliant, not-always-easy-to-follow examination of the upper class's failure to understand the lessons of World War I as Britain slouches toward disaster in its own self-satisfied way.

The third Shaw play this summer, "On the Rocks," is a political comedy about a prime minister who goes from having no ideas (George W. Bush?) to having too many (Newt Gingrich?). I've never seen this rarely produced work, but will I actually be seeing it? Maxwell has had the moxie - or more likely the effrontery - to hire Canadian playwright Michael Healey to write a new version of the play. It's the perfect conceit for a post-modern world where only shifting perceptions matter because there is no objective reality. So anything you write is fair game for somebody else to rewrite. It's the start of a new project for the Festival - as if Shaw is no longer good enough to stand on his own, assuming he has an "own" of his own to stand on.

So what's to look forward to? For me, it's not the plays by Shaw but rather J.M. Barrie's "The Admirable Crichton" and Lennox Robinson's "Drama at Inish - A Comedy." Barrie is one of those appealing English playwrights whose work keeps showing up at the Shaw. This season, it's "Crichton," a 1902 social comedy that tests the convictions of a British aristocrat who argues that class distinctions are artificial. When he and his family find themselves stranded on an island, their butler Crichton takes over. But what happens when they're rescued? This is the kind of revival that the Shaw was put on this earth to do; the festival should be able to pull it off...admirably.

The other play I'm eager to see is "Drama at Inish," by a playwright who is often overlooked even though he was part of the Irish theatrical renaissance with Lady Gregory, O'Casey, Synge, and Yeats. In fact, Shaw has never done any of Robinson's plays before. It looks at what happens to a happy town when a repertory company shows up one summer to perform plays by the likes of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, and then takes their melancholy truths to heart - a comedy about theater itself.

True, "My Fair Lady" is one of the towering American musicals, perhaps the finest example of what had by the mid-50's come to be known as the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Most of these shows were adaptations of other works, so it's fitting for Shaw to choose a musical based on Shaw's "Pygmalion," the story of Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins set to music by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner. Benedict Campbell plays Higgins, and the often-underused Neil Barclay as Alfred P. Doolittle finally has a role worthy of his talents. Nonetheless, isn't it also time to give the show a rest? There are so many good musicals that deserve to be revived, but every "My Fair Lady" and "Camelot" (see the 2011 schedule for the Stratford Festival) keep them from the stage for at least one more year.

Other productions worth considering: "Maria Severa" is the season's second musical, a new work by Jay Turvey and the Shaw Festival's musical director, Paul Sportelli, based on the story of the eponymous mother of fado, Portugal's street music, as she moves from the slums of Lisbon to become a world-famous singer.

For moviegoers, Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" conjures up memories of Elizabeth Taylor or Paul Newman. Both were gorgeous in the 1958 movie version, but Hollywood's production code was still in effect. The result is significantly different from what Williams originally wrote. It remains to be seen if Moya O'Connell and Gray Powell as Maggie and Brick can make an audience forget Taylor and Newman for a couple of hours, even though the always-powerful Jim Mezon will be there to fill the stage as Big Daddy.

After its great success as the noontime play in 2008, Ferenc Molnar's "The President" returns. In less than 45 minutes, be prepared to encounter a bank president, a young heiress, her secret marriage to a Commie taxi driver, and the very funny way the president solves the problem the marriage raises. The cast is close to a Shaw dream come true, including the wonderful William Vickers and Michael Ball. Americans old enough to remember it will recognize the story from its 1961 movie adaptation, "One, Two, Three," directed by Billy Wilder and starring James Cagney.

Finally, if there are exceptions to my carping about the season back in the first paragraph, they may lie in the two new plays in the new Studio Theater, located in the Production Centre behind the Festival Theatre building. The plays this year are "When the Rain Stops Falling" by Andrew Bovell, the Shaw's first try at a work from Australia, and "Topdog/Underdog" by Suzan-Lori Parks, about two con-artist brothers whose father named them Lincoln and Booth as a joke. Bovell's sprawling work begins in 1959 and ends 80 years later, having told the story, mainly, of a single family. Parks' profane take on the Cain and Abel story won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2002.

2011 Shaw Festival

Through October 30

Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada

800-511-SHAW, shawfest.com