BF26: Gil Garratt continues the work of guiding the Blyth Festival ship
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
Gil Garratt is now well into his second decade at the helm of the Blyth Festival, serving as its artistic director since the 2015 season and shepherding it through its historic 50th season in 2024.
At the time of the 2024 and 2025 seasons, there were plenty of opportunities to be nostalgic with a remount of the famed The Farm Show in 2024 and returns to plays written by two of the three Festival founders in 2025 with Anne Chislett’s Quiet in the Land and Keith Roulston’s Powers and Gloria. However, even as those celebrations were taking place, Garratt kept saying that any nostalgia about the past glories of the Festival needed to be matched by excitement for what the next 50 years of the Blyth Festival will hold.
It feels as though that look ahead begins in earnest now. Four of the five plays being produced in Blyth this year are world premieres and, as Garratt has often mentioned, more than half of this year’s company is new to the Festival, which is always an exciting prospect. This season, he says, has a through line of rural strength and resilience, which is something that some of the actors have also noticed. Whether it’s civic responsibility, workers rights, the precarious world of farming or prowess on the baseball field, this year’s shows are about rural communities stepping up and working together, showing that they can achieve anything through co-operation.
On the day that Garratt spoke with The Citizen, he and the rest of the Festival crew welcomed the company for Dry Streak. As has become tradition, Garratt read them “The Concessions”, a famed poem in this area, written by Golden Man Booker Prize-winning author Michael Ondaatje about his time in Huron County. He said that it’s not only a way to tout the area and familiarize newcomers with its geography, but to reiterate just how special a project like the Blyth Festival is. Producing new, Canadian drama in a small village is unique and special, whereas many small communities have and can sustain theatres. What happens in Blyth, he says, is different and the people who seek to be part of the company at the Festival know that.
As for practical work this season, Garratt has a co-playwright credit for The Last Mayor of Rusty River - alongside David Scott and musician John Powers - a show he will also direct.
The show, which deals with the themes of municipal politics, the clash between old guard and new guard and more, is one that has been in the hopper for a number of years now, with Scott submitting the first draft in about 2018. However, while many of the characters were fully fleshed out and realized in that first draft, a lot has changed in the years since.
After Garratt read the first draft, he then penned A Huron County Christmas Carol with the musical assistance of Powers. With that fresh in his mind and thinking that The Last Mayor of Rusty River needed a bit more of a push over the cliff, he wondered about adding music to it with Powers - specifically with a bluegrass feel to it.
Getting the three men - Garratt, Scott and Powers - together proved very quickly to be the right choice. The trio began coming up with some impressive ideas and just cooking up a lot of laughs for the show. They’ve all had their own relationship to municipal politics in Huron County and they found that, during writing sessions when they were all together, they’d have to take frequent breaks after laughing too exhaustively.
When Garratt first approached Scott about bringing music into the show, he wasn’t sure, because he’d never really done anything like that before. However, he trusted in the process and very quickly began to see the results and that it was clearly the right direction.
As for Powers, when Garratt first began working with him, Powers was well known in the area as a rising singer-songwriter who would often perform solo or with his family, playing covers or his own originals. But, writing music for a theatre production was a bit new for him, so Garratt arranged for him to spend some time with Britta Johnson to help him learn about the process.
Johnson is a Stratford native and is now best known as an award-winning writer and director of musicals, like Life After, Kelly vs. Kelly and others (Life After won her two Dora Mavor Moore Awards). In fact, the Toronto Star has called Johnson “Canada’s next great musical theatre hope.” However, one of her earliest projects, as a teenager, was Alligator Tears at the Blyth Festival. That show was the only time that a Young Company show was remounted and, on the Memorial Hall stage no less. No doubt Johnson could teach Powers a thing or two.
The combination of everything coming together has worked, Garratt said, and he couldn’t be happier with what the trio has cooked up. And, furthermore, it comes at the perfect time, as municipal politics, not just in Huron County but across the country are growing increasingly uncivil, dangerous and, in Garratt’s own words, “bananas”. The three men have agreed that, to a certain extent, when a situation gets too kooky for the average brain to comprehend, humour is the only appropriate pressure release valve, which is where The Last Mayor of Rusty River comes in.