Taking A Look At The Shaw Festival

The Shaw Festival is an extensive festival that is located in Niagara-on-the-Lake. The festival was originally founded in 1962 by Brian Dorothy and was dedicated to producing plays by George Bernard Shaw, because, as Dorothy explains in his book Not Bloody Likely, “Shaw was the only outstanding playwright in English, with the obvious exception of Shakespeare (7). In the first season, two plays were chosen: Candida and the “Hell Scene” from Man and Superman, the plays that started the Festival. Dorothy adds and says that in the first season no one in the crew was paid, and the work was mostly voluntarily (14). According to Shaw Festival Production Record by Johnson, Denis, and Jean German, Dorothy gathered a group of amateur performers with

That year the Shaw Festival received the first $2,400 grant from the Canada Council (Dorothy, 42). As Conolly describes in his novel The Shaw Festival: The First Fifty Years,1967 was the year when Paxton Whitehead began managing the company and continued managing it for twelve seasons. Whitehead extended the Festival into many new fields, such as one person show, music, modern plays, and more, while still keeping the plays of Shaw as the essence of the Festival (Conolly, 31). During the years of 1967 to 1971, the Festival gained more success, and while the capacity of seats was overfilled with the audience, the Festival was still looking for a permanent theatre (Dorothy, 54). Holmes says in her book, The Pictorial Stage: Twenty-five Years of Vision and Design at the Shaw Festival, that in 1972, the Shaw Festival finally finished building their new permanent building- now known to us as the Festival Theatre (8). In 1980, Christopher Newton started working for the company as the new artistic director and brought the addition of the third theatre, the Royal