Shaw Festival Ditches George Bernard Shaw

"It's not you, it's just a really uncultured audience."

The 2012 season of the annual Shaw Festival at the Festival Theatre will not include a play by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. The festival, whose mandate is to “produce and present the work of George Bernard Shaw,” will not include its namesake's work for the first time since it started 51 years ago. Festival co-ordinators found that while it isn’t hard to get people to attend the festival itself, it’s nearly impossible to sell seats to Shaw’s plays. Instead, the Niagara-on-the-Lake festival will feature Rag Time, Present Laughter, and His Girl Friday on the main stage with smaller productions of Shaw’s Misalliance and The Millionairess at other venues. Apparently, a Nobel Prize for Literature can only get you so far.