No question about it, community theater of all types is booming on Oahu. In the past month, local theater fans have had an unusually rich and diverse menu to choose from.

Want Broadway musicals? Well, there was Manoa Valley Theatre's bowdlerized version of “;Hair,”; Diamond Head Theatre's humorous jukebox musical, “;Shout! The Mod Musical,”; a beautifully staged production of “;A Chorus Line”; at Army Community Theatre, and Castle Performing Art Center's superb staging of “;13.”;

Contemporary drama has been well represented with “;The Shape of Things,”; presented at The ARTS @ Marks Garage by the All The World's A Stage Theatre Company, and Hawaii Repertory Theatre's Hawaii premiere staging of “;Mauritius.”;

And, as the announcer would say in those old-time late-night television commercials, there's more! A newly written musical presented recently at the Earle Ernst Lab Theater, for instance, and Kumu Kahua's pragmatic blending of traditional Hawaiian stories and hapa haole culture in “;Maui the Demigod.”;

With all those recent productions to choose from, and more coming this month, Joyce Maltby, director of the Hawaii Pacific University theater program, is dealing with all that competition by going back to “;the classics.”;

“;I thought about this for years,”; Maltby said during a quick phone call last week. “;If I chose a playwright or a type of theater that may not be going on too much, those people who are specifically interested in it might come out.”;

And so, after presenting beautifully staged productions classics by French and Russian playwrights in recent years Maltby is returning to English theater with George Bernard Shaw's 1894 hit, “;Arms and the Man.”;

The show was a hit several times on Broadway as well as on the London stage, but more than 100 years later, and almost 60 years after Shaw's death, Maltby said she “;can't even remember the last time (a) Shaw (play) has been done (in Hawaii).”;

“;I have no idea how many people are going to come out for him, but I feel good about doing him, and those people who want to see Shaw will get a chance.”;

THE STORY is a comedy set during the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885—which was a real conflict, by the way. At its heart is a romantic Bulgarian woman, Raina (Lacey Chu), her fiancee, Major Sergius Saranoff (David Albert), and Captain Bluntschili (Troy Apostol), a Swiss mercenary fighting for Serbia, whom she allows to hide in her bedroom so he won't be killed by the Bulgarians.

Maltby confessed that she's a Shaw fan.

“;I love Shaw, but I've never done a Shaw play. I've read and studied a lot of them, and I haven't seen many of them produced, but I love his language. He's so wonderfully witty and clever, and yet his themes are strong—they're not superficial themes at all.”;

The story arc of “;Arms”; takes away the “;glorification of war and romance,”; allowing audiences to view both from a more realistic perspective, she added.

The biggest challenge in doing the show at HPU was finding a few good men.

“;It's always easier to find women,”; she said. “;I took another week to get all the men.

“;It seems to be the case with every show I do, and I think that's one of the problems with the competition (between theater groups)—it's not (competition for) the audience as much as getting the actors.”;

Coming full circle, Maltby said “;the classics”; are a good fit in setting HPU apart from Oahu's other theater companies.

“;The new theater groups are mostly doing newer work, and TAG seems to be doing newer work. Diamond Head and Manoa Valley do mostly musicals, and their plays generally are newer plays.

“;It seems like the classics are good for HPU, and I think it's important to support the classics.”;