Blyth Festival 2025: George Meanwell is back as an actor and musical director
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
Actor and musician George Meanwell is back in Blyth, and he’s brought some of his favourite instruments along with him. The veteran is taking on quite a few roles this season, even by Blyth’s standards. Luckily, Meanwell is fairly certain that every decision he’s ever made has been preparing him for this very occasion. Despite his packed schedule, Meanwell found the time to stop by The Citizen’s office for a wide-ranging conversation about the things that really matter in life - music, memories and tree planting.
So what is keeping him so busy this season? “Everybody in the company is actually in three plays this summer,” Meanwell explained. “Working backwards, the third play is Radio Town, a history of CKNX in Wingham, which was sort of ‘Nashville North’ through the thirties and forties and fifties. And I don’t yet know what I’m doing in that.” It’s still early on in the production process, but Meanwell is already thoroughly impressed with the story of W.T. “Doc” Cruickshank, the central figure in Radio Town. “I didn’t realize what a huge impact he had, and what a great story the development of that radio station is… he got in very early on with this new technology, and it turned into something with the people that he knew and the people he collected, and he was able to turn it into this fantastic thing.”
The magic of radio is not lost on Meanwell. “I grew up in Windsor, and I am a radio kid. In the fifties and sixties, we had a television, but I used to listen to the radio at night,” he said. “It was just AM radio. And I had a crystal set that I would clip to the radiator in our house and listen with an earpiece - didn’t require batteries, didn’t require anything. But at night, I could hear Nashville and Chicago and New York.”
Meanwell’s middle role is in Anne Chislett’s play Quiet in the Land. “I’m playing an American bishop who comes up and sort of gives support to the Amish communities during this time of conscription. They’re wrestling with what their faith obliges them to do, and what the government is asking them to do,” he explained. “My character is a sort of generous person and he’s open, but he’s certainly very much a person who’s in possession of himself, and who also recognizes his responsibilities. He’s not wildly emotional, and he does not get involved in conflict, or stuff like that. And have I just described my own personality? Sure.”
Finally, the first production he’ll be in is The Wind Coming Over the Sea. Meanwell still can’t believe that he’s wound up wearing so many hats in its world premiere - it all happened so fast. “I was asked to take part in a reading of a new play, by Emma Donoghue, last fall - it was very short notice. And I got to the reading, and we read through the play. Beautiful, beautiful play, and I was really, really excited that I had the opportunity to do that,” he recalled. “But also, I felt immediately like I wanted to do this play more than anything I’ve ever wanted to do.”
The historical musical felt like the perfect fit for Meanwell. “I started playing Irish music about 13 years ago, and I’m completely obsessive, so the chance to be in a play about the Irish diaspora, that involves playing Irish music, is perfect,” he explained. “I spent most of my professional career as a classical cellist, and I love the instrument… but I have been obsessed with playing fiddle for the last 10 years or so.”
Now, Meanwell is not just in Donoghue’s first musical - he’s in it a lot. “I play a number of different characters - I play a Yorkshire Sheriff, an English passenger on a trans-Atlantic ship, an American shopman, a Canadian shopman, and a Quebecois labourer,” he listed. “And then, the main role that I have is William Nettleton, an Ulster farmer in Ontario, who comes into the proceedings sort of in the second half of the play.”
Playing so many roles in a single production can be a challenge, but it’s one that Meanwell intends to do well. “We are going to be telling this story with some indications of different characters, but it’s not as if you get to leave the stage, change into a completely different costume, and enter as somebody unrecognizable,” he pointed out. “That’s more the kind of thing I was fortunate to do in A Huron County Christmas Carol, a year and a half ago. I had a great quick change, where I went from being Jacob Marley in chains to being Doc, who ran the CKNX station in the next scene. That involved completely different clothing, completely different hair, completely different makeup - everything. A very bright line. This isn’t going to be that, so much.”
Without costumes, wigs and make-up to fall back on, Meanwell will need to offer audiences more subtle clues as to who he is, and when. “A lot of the characterization is going to be in accents,” he explained. “There’s going to be costume and prop indications that I’m a different person, but I have to do just as much with my voice. It falls much more to how I use my voice, and the kind of accent that I use … I actually had a meeting with Alison, the dialect coach for this show, this morning. She’s great.”
The way he physically presents each character is also a critical part of creating a coherent narrative for the audience. “It’s a little bit like clown training,” Meanwell mused. “You have to embody the physical characteristics of somebody, to make it clear how the story is being told, right? It’s a huge challenge! We’ll see how it goes!”
Musically, Meanwell will be pulling out all the stops for this production. “I get to play lots of instruments in The Wind Coming Over the Sea,” he confided. “So far, I’m playing concertina, harp, guitar, cello, and I think I’ll be playing some fiddle, if I can work it in!”
Meanwell is also just happy to be back in Blyth. Since he was a child, Meanwell has felt a strong connection to Huron County. “My grandparents built a cottage in behind the airport in 1947 - I’ve been coming up for summers here my entire life, so I’m familiar with the county. I’ve spent a lot of time in Goderich,” he told The Citizen. “When I was a kid, being at the cottage meant the sound of aircraft and gunfire on Saturday evenings, because there were low planes flying over the cottage, and also, there was a gun club out at the airport that did skeet shooting. And they’d be out firing guns on Saturday. On Sunday mornings we’d go out into the fields and find any of the ones that hadn’t been hit,” he recalled. “For all these reasons and more, I feel very happy to be here.”
In addition to playing this cavalcade of characters, Meanwell is also the musical director of Radio Town, and the music supervisor for Quiet in the Land and The Wind Coming Over the Sea. “I don’t know, in terms of character, what I’m going to be doing, but I know I’m going to be writing all the arrangements for Radio Town, and then sort of any music that is required for in between scenes and stuff like that,” he explained. “Being the music director for a play like that is a bit of a challenge, because you have to have a clear sense of the big pieces that you want to have in the show, and you need to have a clear sense, as you move towards the show, of what the singers’ range is,” he explained. “What key are they going to have to be in? And then, as you get closer, you get a clearer sense of who’s available. You know, if somebody’s in the scene, and then there’s a song immediately afterwards, is it something where everybody can stop what they’re doing, pick up an instrument, and do a song? Or is it something where the song is going to start with a few instruments, and then add instruments? It’s very much in the service of storytelling.”
Meanwell is excited to be part of such a musical Festival season. “People experience music in different ways. First of all, there’s the sound of music. I really, really love the sound that the instruments I play make. Just the physical experience of putting a bow on a fiddle, or putting a bow on a cello, or the way a guitar rings, or the way a harmonica sounds plaintive, or the way a banjo sounds - and that is just about vibrations and physics and all that stuff,” he posited. “And then on top of that, there’s the whole way in which we perceive music and melody.”
He thinks that the music in The Wind Coming Over the Sea will really capture the hearts of the audience in Blyth. “One of the fantastic things is that all of the songs in it are really old traditional songs - beautiful melodies, not really complicated,” he said. “They don’t have fancy harmonies, they don’t modulate, they don’t have a bridge, they don’t have an outro, or any of that stuff. But in some sense, they’re these simple melodies that sit right at the centre of how we experience music. If we were lucky enough to have a parent who sang us a lullaby, it was probably one of those melodies. Just simple movement, from note to note.”
The old-time tunes in Radio Town: The Doc Cruickshank Story are also sure to please. “In country music, you can have a Hank Williams song, and you just need one person and guitar to sing it,” Meanwell explained. “And then, of course, at the other extreme, there’s orchestras, and the incredible complexity of that. Or Beyoncé, and the incredible complexity of the sort of landscape that she and her producers create, in which there’s all this stuff going on.”
When it came to pursuing a career as a professional musician, Meanwell charted his own course. “I very much, currently, enjoy playing Irish music on the fiddle. … I came from a family that was musical, who sang, and I was raised in an Anglican church in Windsor, Ontario. So I had a lot of experience in choir. I began playing guitar and cello, sort of simultaneously, around Grade 6. I have to give a shout-out to the music school system - there was a string program in Windsor, and that’s where I learned the cello.”
In high school, Meanwell abandoned the cello in favour of the guitar, and decided to study East Asian Language and History at McGill University. But mostly, he just played guitar. One day, he realized that he didn’t really care about learning Mandarin - he wanted to make music instead. “And so I dropped out of school, and started taking piano lessons, around when I was 20,” he said.
Meanwell picked up more and more instruments over the years, eventually deciding to return to his first love: the cello. “I started being a serious cellist when I was 22, which is long past when people tell you you have to start - at four,” he said. Meanwell ignored the naysayers, becoming an accomplished professional cellist - he’s even shared an orchestra pit with Yo-Yo Ma! “There were things about it that were difficult so yeah, I should have started when I was four. But that wasn’t all that I wanted to be - I also wanted to be a folk singer, and do all this… I got my equity card when I was 60.”
Meanwell’s secret to success? “Try to avoid rooms where people can tell you not to do what you want to do. That’s what I did - I just didn’t go into rooms where people would say ‘no, you shouldn’t be doing this. I knew what I wanted to do - I realized that it didn’t make sense, that I would want to do this. I realized that it didn’t look promising to people. But I just knew what I wanted to do, and I didn’t need people telling me not to do it,” he advised. “There’s this old expression, that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time is right now. That’s it.”