Written and performed by Melody A. Johnson. Directed by Rick Roberts and Aaron Willis. A Lunkamud production in association with Tarragon Theatre. At the Gateway Theatre’s Studio B on Friday, March 6. Continues until March 14

Like an exquisitely polished wooden bowl, Miss Caledonia is a winning combination of down-to-earth charm and finely honed craft.

Melody Johnson has been touring this solo show, based on her mother’s experiences as a pageant contestant in 1950s rural Ontario, for a few years now, so its rhythms have been tightened to perfection. It’s hard not to root for Peggy, who in 1955 is a bored 15-year-old itching to leave the farm and break into show business, which she believes to be her true calling. She hatches a plan to enter small local pageants and eventually win her way up to Miss Canada, with a Hollywood contract to follow.

But “like everything worth searching, there’s always obstacles in front”—in this case, her father, “captain of the puritanical work ethic”, who would rather see Peggy doing chores than practising for something as frivolous as a pageant. Fortunately, Peggy finds an ally and conspirator in her surprisingly resourceful mother.

Johnson steers clear of sentimental cliché by giving her heroine a voice that’s a bracing mix of innocence and self-awareness; she can be understated about her ambitions—“I was eatin’ books, and mostly books where people went places”—or dreamily invoke the name of the nearest metropolis: “Hamilton—oh, Hamilton!” And her descriptions are precise and vivid: her hard-working mother’s hands “are like two small machines”; the stammering milk-truck driver who fancies her has “long asparagus fingers”. Both her observations and her experiences—like a display of her archery skills gone horribly wrong in the first pageant she enters—are often hilarious.

Under the direction of Rick Roberts and Aaron Willis, Johnson’s performance is as fresh and charismatic as her writing; she has a tomboy-ish charm and whip-smart timing. Complementing the storytelling is fiddler Mary Fay Coady, performing an original score by Alison Porter, who plays off Johnson beautifully. The Gateway’s Studio B creates an appropriately intimate setting for a show that is all about heart.

“Being constantly magnetic is real hard,” laments Peggy at one point in the show. But in Miss Caledonia, Johnson pulls it off.