NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONT. — There’s no denying that the Shaw Festival’s world premiere production of Michel Marc Bouchard’s The Divine: A Play For Sarah Bernhardt makes for exciting theatre.

It provides another stunning example of the strength of the festival’s celebrated acting company. And it offers a further vindication of artistic director Jackie Maxwell’s commitment to find new ways of bringing contemporary dramatists into the festival tent while also continuing to serve the festival’s central mandate of exploring the world of George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries.

But while it’s possible to urge anyone who cares about quality theatre to seek out this piece, one also feels obliged to add a caveat of sorts. There is more than one play here struggling to emerge. …

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NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — Moss Hart’s 1948 stage success, Light Up The Sky, needs tender, loving care in performance. The last thing it needs is an overkill approach.

It’s a backstage comedy of sorts — except that its turbulent events occur in Boston in the leading lady’s swanky Ritz-Carlton Hotel suite on the opening day of the pre-Broadway try-out of a new play.

The performance turns into a disaster, and the early bonhomie we’ve witnessed turns into a cat fight in which tempers flare, egos further inflate and the blame game runs rampant.

The ingredients are familiar. So are the essentially stock characters that range from the terribly sincere novice playwright to the volatile diva to the show’s blustering financial backer. Moss Hart was writing about a world he knew intimately; he was also desperately trying to prove that he was capable of going it alone as a playwright instead of relying on the wit and guidance of George S. Kaufman, his writing partner in such evergreen triumphs as You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came To Dinner. …

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   Photo. David Cooper. Jeff Meadows as Colonel Pickering, Harveen Sandhu as Eliza Doolittle and Patrick McManus as Henry Higgins in Pygmalion. Photo by David Cooper.

• NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — Linguistics genius Henry Higgins is lurking behind a pillar in London’s Covent Garden working madly away at his I-Pad.

Flower seller Eliza Doolittle is a feisty street urchin whose form-fitting blue jeans are so full of holes that you wonder whether they will last out the scene, not to mention the complete run of the Shaw Festival’s bold but exhilarating revival of Pygmalion.

This is definitely not Edwardian England we’re experiencing — not with a soundscape that includes Kanye West’s Runaway and Janet Jackson’s Got ‘Til It’s Gone, not with Henry Higgins’s female housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce, sporting a red tee shirt telling us all to “keep calm.”

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Photo: David Cooper.

When it comes to live theatre, some of the nicest surprises come in the smallest of packages.

This year’s Shaw Festival lunchtime presentation is an absolute gem — a 105-year-old playlet from Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie who reveals himself here as a sympathetic advocate of women’s rights.

This funny and provocative one-actor, The Twelve-Pound Look by name, is not overtly political, but it was written at a time when Britain’s suffragettes were actively campaigning for a woman’s right to vote. And the suffrage movement has clear parallels to the play’s preoccupations — the right of a woman to think and behave independently and to be an equal partner in a relationship.

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