Blyth Festival 2025: Randy Hughson takes centre stage in big Festival season
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
In his capacity as one of the Blyth Festival’s all-time favourite thespians, Randy Hughson has been it all - heroes, villains and everything in between. Whether he’s Stompin’ Tom or Ebenezer Scrooge, audiences always tend to turn out in droves when Hughson is in the house. For the 2025 season, he will be one of the many capable actors performing in three different productions - Quiet in the Land, Powers and Gloria, and Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion.
Hughson was kind enough to stop by The Citizen’s office on Queen Street for a quick rundown on the various roles he’ll be bringing to Blyth audiences this time around. “The amount of lines I’ve had to memorize this year is incredible,” he admitted. “I started literally memorizing in mid-January, because I knew if I left it to the allotted rehearsal time, I would not be able to do it. I’ve got a big load this season, but it’s exciting, and I’m really looking forward to it. Just to see the eagerness of the acting company’s faces - the directors, the technicians, and everybody here - the excitement of a new season is a rare and palpable thing.”
He had originally signed on for the roles of Christy in Quiet in the Land, and Powers in Powers and Gloria. “Gil [Garratt] had mentioned to me, in the early winter, that this year, all the actors will be in Quiet in the Land; it’s a large cast,” Hughson explained. Playwright Anne Chislett’s tale of a young Amish man suffering the repercussions of enlisting to fight in World War I premiered at the Blyth Festival in 1981. “Each actor that’s in that will branch out to do these other plays, so we’re all in three shows. It’s a very heavy load, but an exciting one,” he declared.
Last year, Hughson took a risk when he traded out his acting hat for a director’s cap with Birgitte Solem’s Resort to Murder - a quirky locked-room mystery that left audiences enjoyably unsettled, even after the final curtain. But 2024 wasn’t the first time he directed a play for the Blyth Festival - in 2005 Hughson actually directed the premiere of Keith Roulston’s Powers and Gloria, which he will now be starring in this year. “When I directed the premiere production of Powers and Gloria, I got to spend quite a bit of time with Keith. And I was directing it with Jerry Franken in the role that I’m now playing. It’s amazing how, 20 something years later, I’m now playing this guy!” he exclaimed. “But I love Keith - I think he’s got a real talent for storytelling and writing. I think he knows small town and rural life, and it’s one thing to know it, but it’s another thing to be able to put it on a page and write it - and he can write it.”
The third role that Hughson has piled on this season is a well-known historical figure - Sir John A. Macdonald in Drew Hayden Taylor’s Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion. Taylor’s 27th play is a satirical road-trip comedy that was commissioned by the National Arts Centre as part of Canada’s sesquicentennial celebrations in 2017.
As a child growing up in Kingston, Hughson and his classmates would often take field trips to Bellevue House, where Macdonald resided for many years. The version of Canada’s first Prime Minister that he learned about back then bears little resemblance to the one he’s discovered in Taylor’s unflinching satire. “It’s not the most flattering portrait of Sir John A. - so I’m having to dig into some pretty dark, nasty qualities about the man who was ultimately responsible, in the end for setting up the circumstances which created the residential schools,” he explained.
There is a strain to taking on the persona of a historical figure that carries the weight of so much real-life trauma, but Hughson trusts that Taylor’s snappy script will get people laughing just as much as it gets them thinking. “If this was just a straight-on, heavy drama, I don’t think the impact would be nearly as much as the play as it is written now, which is very satirical and very funny in a lot of ways. Satire can deliver a message in ways other forms of theatre can’t,” he posited. “I didn’t pursue Sir John by any means. It’s not easy, sometimes… there are occasional times as an actor where you have to serve a function, to serve the greater good of the story, and what the author is trying to get across.”
He also feels the script skips the straight-up villain route in favour of a more nuanced journey. “With this particular version of him, you get to see a little bit more into his personal life - the tragedy of his personal life, but also the comedy,” Hughson explained. “I'm drawing a lot of the character from somebody who is haunted both by personal tragedy and by the issues before him - creating a new country, forming this confederation, enabling the vision he has for this country to come to fruition - a lot of that is seen through the haze of a hangover… Some of his policies were terribly cruel. There’s some really harsh history that he’s responsible for. But I have to present him as a fully realized human being, and hopefully, I can bring enough layers to the guy that the audience can see perhaps why he made some of the decisions he made.”
So, how is Hughson preparing to portray this polarizing historical figure that has been thrust upon him by fate? “I’m listening to a lot of Billy Connolly, the comedian - he’s from Glasgow, as was Sir John A. The accent is the thing that’s the trickiest,” he said. “So, I’m doing a Glasgow accent, but there’s portions of Quiet in the Land where I have to do quite a thick Amish accent, and, in Powers and Gloria, I’m just speaking the way you and I speak now. So I’ve got my work cut out for me!”
Switching gears between characters is a skill he spent years honing at the Stratford Festival. “I could be performing in a Shakespearean tragedy one night, and then doing a contemporary British farce the next, and then a Canadian drama the day after that. So, I think I got used to sort of being able to shut down one play, focus, have those few hours, get myself focused for the next,” Hughson divulged. “It's not easy to do, especially when you’re doing accents!”
They may come from varied time periods and have different countries of origin, but Hughson has found certain commonalities between the three men that he’s playing. “All three characters are in positions of authority,” he pointed out. “They’re all, to a certain extent, patriarchs, leaders, innovators - every one of them. But I guess the common thread is they’re all people who have a desire to thrust their ideas onto others - people who are, in their minds, at the apex of power.”
But what keeps Hughson coming back to the Blyth Festival, year after year, role after role? “Here, we’re all breathing the same air. We’re all listening to the same story. We’re all involved, and that includes the audience, in the telling of the story, and in the receiving of the story. And we’re all a part of that unique experience, that night, which is different than any other night, because it’s different people each night. It creates a different energy in the audience, which creates a different energy on stage, I think,” he mused. “We’re not in downtown Toronto - there are a lot of stories, and a lot of wonderful stories, both from Huron County and Perth County, from this local area, which have been told on that stage. But this audience is the reason - this audience is coming to see Canadian work. That’s what this theatre does - that’s what they develop, that’s where they put their focus, their money and their mandate - it’s all about Canadian work.”