A tale of two festivals.

EVA RESNIKOVA has been writing in these pages of the sad state of Broadway and the gladder state of Off Broadway; but there is even better news farther off Broadway--namely, at the summer theater festivals. Two of the best are outside our borders but well within reach of the Northeast and upper Midwest: the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, both located on that arrowhead of southern Ontario that pokes down between Buffalo and Detroit.

Reviews of urban theater concentrate, it goes without saying, on the play. But ambiance is part of the point at festivals. When Clive Barnes was the New York Times's chief reviewer in the early Seventies, he would always begin his first Stratford piece of the season with a brooding assessment of the town's unintended value as a diet spa. Then came the year when, under a new artistic director, Robin Phillips, Stratford perked up. Barnes led off his review not with, Finally, a good Hamlet! but with, Finally, a decent restaurant! Phillips has since departed, but several more than decent restaurants have come and stayed.

In honor of Nika Hazelton, who graced Delectations for 25 years until her retirement this spring, I shall follow Barnes's lead and begin with Neil Baxter, the star not of the Festival stage but of Rundles, a cheerful little restaurant overlooking the river. Baxter's is true nouvelle cuisine, in the tradition of Fernand Point and Paul Bocuse, not the New York/California kiwi-with-everything variety. His salmon strudel, confit of duck, warm quail salad, and lemon tart were enough to make visits to Stratford imperative even during those grim years when the company was wounded by a disagreement over Phillips's successor that took on Canadian-nationalist, kick-out-the-Brits overtones.

The wounds healed, and some of the most popular members of the company these days are English--notably Brian Bedford, who originally came to play opposite Maggie Smith (in, e.g., Private Lives, Molnar's The Guardsman, Much Ado) and wound up making Stratford his home base. Bedford stars in the surprise hit of the first half of the season, Timon of Athens.