Bar settings, much like hotel environments, are a surreal breeding ground for the oddest of characters to congregate and the wildest of narratives to uncoil. Anything can happen and anything usually does.

That’s why William Saroyan’s humanity oozing and comedy soaked The Time of Your Life is probably the summer’s dreamiest production.

The time is 1939 San Francisco as America inches toward the Second World War. The place is a ‘lil honky tonk” run by Nick (John Jarvis) the bartender and occupied by a mystery man named Joe (Joseph Ziegler), his trusty errand runner, Tom (Kevin Bundy), a lovable woman of ill repute, Kitty Duval (Patricia Fagan), and a gift-for-the gab straggler, Kit (Stuart Hughes). They’re not alone, or course, yet four characters represent a gateway to all things beautiful in the world.

Just when you think Joseph Ziegler can’t get any better, he’s gone and done it again. As Joe, a self-proclaimed student of live and eternal observer, the actor is total ear candy as he delivers line after line of condensed wisdom. “In the time of your life, live,” her urges.

Kevin Bundy’s earnest performance as Tom shimmers with innocence in his portrayal of a young man whose ambitions always seem out of reach for him. But it’s Patricia Fagan’s trying to find the straight and narrow Kitty Duval that may be elevate Tom where he needs to be. It is Joe that watches over them and ultimately orchestrates their merging of hearts.

If you’ve never been a big Stuart Hughes fan in his take-it-or-leave-it roles for Soulpepper, be prepared to eat crow pie. Kit asks, “I don’t suppose you ever fell in love with a midget weighing thirty-nine pounds?” It’s one of the more absurd moments from a happy wanderer who wears his life on his face. Hughes does more than animate the character; he downright re-invents the too-dumb-for-his- own-good essence that makes up Kit’s design.

There are few moments in theatre more outrageous than the bubblegum chewing scene between Tom and Joe closer to the end of the play. This rib-splitting scene alone is worth the cost of admission.

The Time of Your Life drifts across reverie and axiom; abstraction and asperous existence in this blemish free staging.