Showtime

What: A Little Night Music and After The Dance

Where: Shaw Festival

When: Now through Oct. 4

Tickets: 1-800-511-7429

Thank goodness in this weary world of safe musicals someone is willing to take a chance on the sophisticated genius of Stephen Sondheim.

The man's musicals aren't just entertainment, they're art. They transcend the popular draw churned out by Broadway tunesmiths determined to seduce with cornball comedy, false emotion and radio jingles.

Surely audiences somewhere care about intelligent words and music?

Well, thankfully those are the people lining up at Shaw Festival this summer to savour the genius of Sondheim.

Unalloyed joy pulses at the heart of this 1973 romp. Here are lovers caught in the winking light of the moon rediscovering what it means to give their hearts fully.

Using Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night as a jumping-off point, Hugh Wheeler's romantic book and Sondheim's heartbreaking music and lyrics offer pure, unadulterated magic. Here is something that touches the heart, buoys the spirit and sends you out of the theatre light years younger than when you stepped in.

Awash in waltz-time, A Little Night Music is blessed with a melodic, richly elegant score. From the brilliant Send In The Clowns with its bittersweet mood of resigned loss and lamentation, to the bracing sweep of A Weekend In The Country with its promise of new seduction, Sondheim hits his stride in this amusing look at old young, new love, borrowed love and blue love.

Director Morris Panych has successfully reimagined the show for the small space at Shaw's Court House Theatre without ever losing a thing.

With designer Ken MacDonald, he has created a world of stately birch trees and period furniture. Swept off and on by a quintet of Lieder singers who act as a Greek chorus.

Not everything is perfect with the casting. Thom Allison hasn't anything like the glorious ego of Count Carl-Magnus. Underplaying and oversinging the role, he robs the character of necessary humour.

Likewise, Robin Even Wills is all brittle pique and childish rage as Anne Egerman when a sweet childlike quality would work better.

Never mind, most of this cast is splendid, with Donna Belleville a thrilling Madame Armfeldt.

Goldie Semple strikes just the right note of faded cynicism and nurturing charm as Desiree, her actress daughter.

And George Masswohl ultimately grows into the role of Frederik, though he takes the stodgy nature of the man too seriously.

Julie Martell as the saucy maid Petra, Mark Uhre as her lover Fritz and Justin Stadnyk as poor sexually repressed Henrik are all superb.

Patty Jamieson refashions the role of Countess Charlotte as a shrill, shrewish woman. Unfortunately she sings her big number, Every Day A Little Death with too much sadness and too little rage.

Still, she gets all her laughs.

Young Michaela Bekenn is lovely as Fredrika Armeldt and Panych has cleverly chosen to see the musical through her young eyes.

At times Paul Sportelli's small chamber band swamps the vocals a little even though he attempts to reign them in.

So, should you see A Little Night Music?

Absolutely.

Sondheim should never be missed. In an ordinary world of Annies, Olivers and Josephs, he offers an intelligent antidote to sentiment and silliness.

Terrence Rattigan's sharp drama After the Dance isn't performed all that often. Unlike The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables, Rattigan pieces that have survived the 30 or 40 years he's fallen into disfavour, this play pretty much disappeared.

Director Christopher Newton and a crack cast have revived the play brilliantly at Shaw's Royal George Theatre.

It's deliciously old-fashioned. Set in William Schmuck's elegant Mayfair flat, with muted green walls and overstuffed furniture, it's a landscape of regret.

Characters here hover on the fringe of bohemia, perpetual partygoers living in fear of emotion.

They dance and bob about elegantly living in some twilight world of the trivial. Refusing to acknowledge reality, they just keep on dancing, avoiding contact with their deeper feelings.

They contribute nothing, feel nothing, wasting their petty lives.

Deborah Hay is superb as Joan Scott-Fowler, Ken James Stewart likable as disillusioned young Peter, and Patrick Galligan suitably icy as David, emotionally dead and drained of feeling.

Newton has directed superbly, filling the play's silences with great meaning.

Gary Smith has written on theatre and dance for The Hamilton Spectator for more than 25 years.