Blyth Festival 2025: Landon Doak is taking the lead(s) in their second season

BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN

Landon Doak is returning to the Blyth Festival after a first season for the ages - as part of last year’s The Farm Show: Then and Now cast - and is now tackling another legendary work in the Festival canon: Anne Chislett’s Governor General Award-winning Quiet in the Land.

 

Of course, like most of this year’s company members, Doak is not just performing in one show, but three. In addition to Chislett’s show, Doak will be performing in Emma Donoghue’s The Wind Coming Over The Sea and Nathan Howe’s Radio Town: The Doc Cruickshank Story. But it’s Quiet in the Land that holds a special place in Doak’s heart for the role it played early in the young actor’s career. 

 

As a young actor with success on the Canadian stage on the brain, Doak purchased a drama book, an anthology of sorts, full of monologues for young, male actors and one of the performances Doak chose to memorize and perform was that performed by young Yock in Chislett’s show. So, Doak is hoping to hit the ground running with that show. Even now, when Doak has talked to friends who are also in the theatre world, they have issued a call-and-response to Quiet in the Land, responding to Doak with the first line of the monologue. It seems the Festival sophomore isn’t the only person with that anthology on the book shelf.

 

So now, to be playing Yock at the Blyth Festival, where Quiet in the Land premiered, and opposite the great Randy Hughson no less, it’s truly a watershed moment in Doak’s career.

 

This comes after another daunting task, which was being part of The Farm Show cast in last year’s season. The birth of modern Canadian theatre, telling the stories of Paul Thompson, Janet Amos, Ted Johns, Theatre Passe Muraille, the Blyth Festival and, yes, The Farm Show, is now taught in Canadian university theatre programs, Doak said, so it was amazing to step into that world and rub shoulders with the people who paved the way for this all to be happening. And the connection the young actor found with the audience and the community that year was second to none and really made Doak feel at home.

 

The Festival must believe greatly in Doak and the other actors in this year’s company, as they are now charged with performing in three shows this season, as opposed to just one or two, as has been the norm.

 

Doak says there is a true connection between the Blyth Festival company and its audiences that is supportive and engaged in a way that many Toronto-based theatre relationships are not. The actor feels there is an enthusiasm about the theatre among the audience members and a true support that comes from them wanting the Festival to succeed that can be absent in some of the bigger theatres. 

 

Another highlight of the season for Doak will be Emma Donoghue’s The Wind Coming Over The Sea in which Doak will be one of the two romantic leads alongside Shelayna Christante. The two are partners off the stage as well: a true Blyth Festival power couple.

 

Both shows, Doak says, carry such weight with them in today’s world. Whether it’s Donoghue’s story of early Irish immigration or Chislett’s division between community and duty and the freedom to be a pacifist in a world at war, the shows echo through the halls of time in a way that is unique and exciting.

 

Born and raised in Newmarket, Ontario, Doak has fit a tremendous amount of experience and achievement into what is, at this point, a relatively short career. Doak has already been a cast member for three Dora Mavor Moore Award-winning shows (Peter Pan for Bad Hats Theatre in 2017, Life in a Box in 2020 and Alice in Wonderland in 2023). Further theatre credits for Doak include shows at the Stratford Festival, Shakespeare in High Park and Canadian Stage, Bad Hats Theatre, Soulpepper in Toronto, Musical Stage Company, the Shaw Festival, Essential Collective Theatre and more. Doak is also an award-winning composer.

 

When reflecting on the shows at hand, Doak hopes they will open audience members up to thinking about issues like war, peace, community, family, religion, immigration and the universal truth that people everywhere just want the same things and have the same needs and desires in a different, compassionate light.