May is here and so is one of my very favorite subjects to write about. The Stratford and Shaw festivals of remarkable theater already have performances on their stages – a practice which they will continue through early November.

Also in Toronto, which is only about a four-hour drive from Jamestown and even nearer to Dunkirk and Fredonia, they are in preparation to open the Luminato Festival of the Arts. Coming what seems like only a short while after the empty weeks of winter, just when all these riches are being offered, our own companies and arts organizations are beginning to increase the frequency of their offerings, and since our principal responsibility is to write about the arts in Chautauqua County, that’s what we’ll do.

For readers who can slip away, we want to devote one column to all the high quality arts events which can be found in Canada a reasonable drive from here.

We do remind you that our government now requires that you have a valid passport or other comparable legal document in order to cross the border in either direction for these events in Canada. Also, prices relating to any of these functions are in Canadian funds. That means that for each dollar you spend there, you must first purchase the right amount of Canadian dollars from a bank or money-exchanging business.

At the time of this writing, buying a Canadian dollar costs about 80 cents in U.S. currency. The rate of exchange changes constantly, but usually only slightly.

This week, let’s look at Canadian arts festivals.

LUMINATO

While the Stratford and Shaw festivals last roughly half a year and are largely theatrical in nature, Luminato is a 10-day celebration of the arts, scattered at venues and sites all around the city of Toronto. Its events range from pricey performances in formal sites to those standing on a street corner playing music while anyone who passes by may choose to listen or even to dance.

While there are some plays and some concerts on the Luminato schedule, there are also visual arts exhibits, dance performances, lectures, discussions, films, readings and official culinary arts events. My recommendation is to go to the official website at www.luminatofestival.com. Across the top of the page, you will see 10 black boxes in a horizontal row. Each box will have one of the 10 dates between June 19 and 28. Click on any of the boxes and a drop-down menu will appear showing all the events which will be taking place in the festival on that date.

The festival includes many free public events and you could have a fine time just showing up and participating in them. However, if you very much want to see and hear certain events, you are well-advised to purchase tickets as soon as possible because many of the formal events sell out.

Another computer site which is helpful is www.seetorontonow.com, which is operated by the Greater Toronto Visitor’s Bureau. They can help you buy tickets and check hotels for availability and make reservations for hotels and even restaurants which accept reservations.

You can fly to Toronto or go by train from either Buffalo or Niagara Falls. You can go by bus. By far the easiest thing to do is to drive. If you take I-90 east to the exit for I-190 and follow that road, it will take you to an exit for the Peace Bridge. Cross the bridge and steer your car into one of the immigration lanes with has an “open” sign above it. Clearing the immigration booth may take anything from five to 90 minutes, or occasionally, even more. Show your official documents to the immigration official and answer a few questions and you’ll probably be easily admitted to Canada. When the agent tells you to drive on, you will immediately encounter a toll booth for the bridge which you just crossed. When you’ve paid your toll just drive straight away and you’ll be on your way to Toronto on the Queen Elizabeth Way or QEW.

At the Toronto city limits, the QEW changes its name to the Gardner Expressway. There are three exits for downtown Toronto. The exit for Spadina Avenue splits part way down the ramp and offers you access to either Spadina or University Avenue. The exit for York Bay and Yonge streets branches into single exits for each of those streets. The third exit is for Jarvis Street. In my experience, if you’re going fairly fast and suddenly need to choose one of several branches for the exit ramp, it can cause you to choose badly on the spur of the moment.

Hotels in Toronto vary from among the most expensive and luxurious in the world to dorms at city universities, which are being rented out to keep student costs down. Once you’ve chosen one of them, contact the hotel for directions from the Gardner Expressway.

SHAW FESTIVAL

The nearest of the three festivals to our area is the Shaw Festival, located in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. It takes roughly two hours of driving, not including border crossing, meal stops, etc., to arrive there. The festival is held in honor of Irish-born playwright philosopher and critic George Bernard Shaw. It operates under a mandate to produce plays which were written during his life time roughly 1850 to 1950 or plays written later dealing with the period of his life. The mandate gives them fewer choices but produces expert works on the literature of that century in time.

Both Shaw and Stratford festivals have a repertory company. That is a group of actors, each of whom performs a role in each of two or three of the season’s offerings. If you are lucky enough to go back for several seasons, you begin to get a sense not only of the plays but also of the individual talents of the actors. You learn how to separate the acting from the role.

Shaw Festival operates four theaters, and at the peak of the season, all four will be presenting two performances per day. That means that any day of the week but Monday, you have your choice of two out of eight performances. Curtains rise at 2 and 8 p.m.

At this time, the performances are previews. That means that the director and the actors may try things at one performance which they do not do at different performances to get a sense of what works best. Previews are less expensive than regular performances, but they may well be different than what the audiences who see the regular performances will be seeing. In very rare circumstances, they may even need to be stopped to fix a problem which has arisen.

When the play officially opens, it will be ”frozen,” and what you see in one performance, you will almost certainly see in any other performance of that play.

Logically, no one is allowed to review a preview performance. It would be great to run up in May and see many performances so that we can be home in time to review the Bach and Beyond Festival and the openings at Chautauqua, but that is not a choice. We probably get more requests for information and more comments from readers about these two festivals than about any other single subject, so we’ll cover as much there as we can arrange for.

Meanwhile, let me tell you what the choices are for this season. When you know the dates on which you can attend, you can go to their website and see what productions are available on certain days.

The largest theater at Shaw is the Festival Theatre. This season, it will be home to the musical show ”Sweet Charity,” which was written by Neil Simon and based on the Italian art film ”The Nights of Cabiria.” A second choice would be ”Pygmalion” by Shaw himself, the play which served as the basis of the musical show ”My Fair Lady.” The third choice is ”Light Up the Sky” by Moss Hart, who wrote ”The Man Who Came to Dinner” and many more classic American comedies.

The second largest house is a perfect little jewel box of a theater called The Royal George. Go there in 2015 to see ”Peter and the Starcatcher,” a modern prequel of the classic ”Peter Pan.” Other choices include ”You Never Can Tell” by Shaw, and ”The Divine,” a play about famed actress Sarah Bernhardt.

The oldest theater is the Court House, in which the audience surrounds the actors on three sides. There, you could see, ”The Lady from the Sea” by Henrik Ibsen, ”Top Girls” by Caryl Churchill, and ”The Twelve Pound Look” by J.M. Barrie, author of ”Peter Pan.”

This season, it is home to only one production: ”The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism, Socialism, with a Key to the Scriptures,” by Larry Kramer, who wrote ”Angels in America” and ”The Normal Heart.” I have no idea how that fits into the mandate.

For prices, curtain times, related lectures and other festival information, phone them at 800-511-7429, or go to their website at www.shawfest.com.

To get there, follow the directions for Luminato above, but about 20 minutes after you clear customs, take the exit from the QEW for Niagara-on-the-Lake. The festival is located in a beautiful little village where there is much to do in addition to attending plays, including scenic hikes, tours of wineries and so forth. Plus, it’s only a few minutes’ drive from Niagara Falls.

The trip from the QEW to the village is not long nor difficult but the directional road signs are unusually small, so be sure to keep a sharp eye out for where to turn.

STRATFORD FESTIVAL

The Stratford Festival is located in Stratford, Ontario. Because both festival and town share the name of William Shakespeare’s birthplace in England, the festival has come to specialize in Shakespearean productions. However, they’re willing and able to produce all types of plays, from those which were written before the birth of Christ to those which have been completed in the past week.

Typically, it takes about four hours of driving from Jamestown to reach Stratford. Once again, you begin with the directions to Toronto, but about an hour after the border crossing, you arrive in the large city of Hamilton. There, the highway offers you a choice between staying on the QEW or changing to Highway 403 west, toward downtown Hamilton. Take the 403 for a short distance to the exit on Route 6 north. Roughly 30 minutes along that route, it will intersect another major highway: the 401. Take that road to the west toward London. In a fairly short while, take an exit for Route 8 west and follow that route into Stratford.

Like the Shaw Festival, Stratford has four theaters and as the season grows to its peak, each holds two performances per day, except Mondays. The choices this season are these:

The Festival Theatre, which is their largest, with an award-winning design by Tama Moisewitz, will be the home to performances of Shakespeare’s ”Hamlet,” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ”The Sound of Music,” and Shakespeare’s ”Love’s Labour’s Lost” and ”The Taming of the Shrew.”

The Avon Theatre, with its traditional proscenium stage, will be home to ”The Diary of Anne Frank,” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ”Carousel,” and Goldsmith’s ”She Stoops to Conquer.”

The Tom Patterson Theatre, with an arena stage which has been greatly elongated, will show you Durrenmatt’s ”The Physicists,” Ben Jonson’s ”The Alchemist,” Shakespeare’s ”The Adventures of Pericles,” and Sophocles’ ”Oedipus Rex.”

The small Studio Theatre, located in the same building as the Avon, will be presenting ”The Last Wife,”about the dangerous and challenging life of Katherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry VIII, and ”Possible Worlds,” a play which posits that there are parallel universes and each of us shifts from one of them to another as we make important choices in our daily lives.

All of these choices offer audiences the highest quality of costumes, settings, and of course, trained classical acting. It’s theater so good you never believed such quality was possible, especially so near to home.

To buy tickets at Stratford or for more information, phone 800-567-1600 or visit their website at www.stratfordfestival.ca. I just can’t imagine anyone not loving the experiences available at any of these.