After sitting through two disappointing seasons at The Shaw Festival in 2009 and 2010, I approached this season with some trepidation. Would the dumbing down of plays and the pandering to audiences that have begun to characterize Shaw under artistic director Jackie Maxwell continue, or would the Festival reassert itself as one of the finest theater festivals in the English-speaking world - admired for the integrity of its work, the clarity of its direction, the quality of its acting, and its gift for recreating the various time periods that came and went during George Bernard Shaw's 96 years?

The results were mixed, but overall the productions were better than they've been recently. I saw six plays. The best without question was Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," the worst was J.M. Barrie's "The Admirable Crichton," and the other four were Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's greatest musical, "My Fair Lady"; Lennox Robinson's genial trifle, "Drama at Inish"; Ferenc Molnar's one-act farce "The President"; and Shaw's witty comedy, "Candida."

The Shaw's 50th anniversary season this year coincides with the celebration of Williams' birth in 1911; the resulting production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" is superb. Set in Brick and Maggie's spacious bedroom in Big Daddy's Mississippi plantation house, it tells the story of Brick, who has rejected his sexually vital wife Maggie and become an alcoholic. He wallows in guilt and self-loathing over the death of his best friend, Scooter, and his fear that he may be homosexual.

Meanwhile Big Daddy, the family patriarch, is dying of cancer as Brick's brother and sister-in-law connive to control the estate after Big Daddy's death. The nights are hot and moist, alcohol flows, and repressed secrets erupt; this is Williams in full Southern Gothic mode.

But it is also a powerful play with two great roles: Maggie and Big Daddy are survivors who endure what must be endured. Both confront Brick to bring him back from his urge to destroy himself, Maggie through seduction, Big Daddy through browbeating and bullying. Moya O'Connell gives an elusive, shifting, but erotically charged performance as Maggie. Conniving in every conceivable way to win back her husband, she is motivated by love and sexual need.

Big Daddy, played ferociously by Jim Mezon, confronts Brick head-on. Liberated by the mistaken belief that he is well, he feels free to assail the lies he finds in his own family, all except Brick. He hates nothing more than what he calls "mendacity." When Mezon is on stage, his intensity creates the kind of silence that feels as if an audience has stopped breathing to be sure it doesn't miss a word.

Eda Holmes' direction opens the play's emotional depths. Rather than imposing an external vision on the production, she lets Williams' rich language illuminate the fullness of his characters and their often-blighted lives.

Anyone tackling Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's "My Fair Lady" has to satisfy the show's need for star power - not always present in an ensemble company like Shaw. But Benedict Campbell as Henry Higgins, the more-or-less misogynistic linguist who transforms a flower girl into a lady, rises to the occasion. His Higgins is charming, witty, and impervious to his own flaws. Campbell sings in a full, pleasing baritone rather than the patter that has defined Higgins since Rex Harrison first created the role in 1956.

Director Molly Smith has wisely returned to Shaw's "Pygmalion," the musical's source, to affirm that Higgins is not the old man Harrison appeared to be in the 1963 movie. Shaw's Higgins is a vigorous man in his mid-40's who rejects women by choice; he prefers life without them. But Smith errs by making Higgins anxious about Eliza's success at the ball; he is - and must be - supremely confident. She also gives us a Higgins who begins to feel affection for Eliza through the play, thereby weakening the great dramatic shift when Higgins recognizes his feelings for her at the end: "I've grown accustomed to her face."

Deborah Hay's Eliza is smart, sharp, and capable of deep feeling, though Hay's abrupt shifts in vocal tone are jarring. Neil Barclay is gloriously funny as Eliza's father, a charter member of the "undeserving poor." Barclay is a large man whose size often results in his being underused; it's good to see him in a part worthy of his talent.

Lennox Robinson is one of the less-remembered members of the Irish Renaissance that included Lady Gregory, Sean O'Casey, John Millington Synge, and William Butler Yeats. "Drama at Inish" is the first of his plays done by the Shaw Festival. It's an engaging comedy that satirizes the theater and offers an affectionate tribute to it at the same time.

The small Irish resort town of Inish stages mindless comedies summer after summer. Nobody goes because they're so dreadful, but the population is contented and happy nevertheless. Determined to improve the lives of the people and increase tourism, the town hires a troupe to perform the likes of Ibsen and Chekhov. Soon the town erupts in arguments, domestic violence, even the threat of murder. All those Modernist plays, with their revelations of the heart's darkest truths, have made everybody miserable even though the acting company consists of second-rate hams whose melodramatic gestures on and off the stage are as phony as they are funny.

Eventually, the town fires the actors, brings in a circus, and everybody's problem disappears. The cast and Jackie Maxwell's direction for this lighthearted frivolity are a pleasure, but Mary Haney as the spinster sister of the owner of the town's hotel, is first among equals. She remains one of the Shaw's deftest comedians. Late in the play, Andrew Bunker as Michael, the bootblack and gofer, renders several recitations, alternately touching and forceful, to remind us amidst the mockery that there's also something here worth respecting.

The lunchtime play from 2009, Ferenc Molnar's "The President," was so successful that it's back this summer. A four-door farce that transforms a boorish Communist taxi driver into an eligible bachelor with perfect Capitalist credentials in one frenzied hour, this delectable non-stop exercise in political nonsense barely stops to make fun of corporate shenanigans before somebody else dashes in (or out) another one of the four doors.

Overseeing it all is the president of an American company, played with brio by Lorne Kennedy. I suggest getting a hearing loop: the sound in the Royal George Theatre isn't crisp and Kennedy executes his tour de force at breakneck speed.

Now we turn to Shaw's "Candida" and Barrie's "The Admirable Crichton," important plays by two of the most important playwrights of their time - and Shaw gets both productions wrong. Claire Jullien is an intelligent, graceful Candida, who ultimately must choose between the two men in her life: her husband, James Morell, a Socialist clergyman, and Eugene Marchbanks, a young poet with overheated emotions. But Nigel Shawn Williams as Morell and especially Wade Bogert-O'Brien as Marchbanks so misplay the characters that Candida is deprived of any real choice, and the audience of anything worth thinking about.

When director Tadeusz Bradecki indulges Bogert-O'Brien's slapstick shenanigans - the curled-up cowering in corners, the falling to the floor - he makes it impossible to believe that Candida would have anything to do with this ninny. It's GBS by way of Red Skelton. I love Skelton, but not in "Candida." Meanwhile, Williams as Morell is merely stolid without the geniality and vitality the clergyman is supposed to possess. As always, Norman Browning, the unrepentant old capitalist who is Candida's father, provides welcome humor.

Barrie's "Crichton" plays with the British class system in 1920. It does so by marooning the Earl of Loam, who believes that class distinctions are false, with his family, a servant or two, and his butler Crichton, by far the ablest person among them. Soon, Crichton is organizing a society and emerging as something very much like its emperor. Only when the party is rescued does he resume his "natural" place in English society. Barrie's play is realistic in style but satiric in viewpoint.

It sounds as if it's going to be entertaining in a straightforward way, a revival of a good play from almost a century ago. So it might have been with the always sure David Schurmann as the not-very-bright Loam and Steven Sutcliffe as the amiably shrewd Crichton. But director Morris Panych - himself a playwright - has treated Barrie's work with contempt. He introduces a series of figures, dressed in tuxedos and wearing animal heads (wolf, rabbit, crane, and so on) to sing and dance the songs and dances of the late 1920's (none of which were in style when the show was first performed) as comments on the action. Sometimes they also tell us what we're about to see, perhaps on the assumption that we're not smart enough to figure it out for ourselves. Finally, if you want a standing ovation, throw in a Charleston number at the end, no matter how gratuitous. It's a case of pandering at its cheapest, and the Shaw Festival should know better.

2011 Shaw Festival

Through October 30

Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada

800-511-SHAW, shawfest.com