Blyth Festival announces its 2027 season
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
This week, Artistic Director Gil Garratt announced the 2027 Blyth Festival season, which will feature four shows and open with an ambitious, sprawling adaptation of one of the country’s most beloved novels.
To open the season, Garratt will be personally adapting Timothy Findley’s The Piano Man’s Daughter, which will be told in two parts in an expansive theatre experiment that has never before been attempted by the Festival.
The book details the story of Charlie Kilworth and his girlfriend Alex. Alex wants to have children, but Charlie is unsure, as he first needs to reckon with his familial past.
Findley does this across generations, going back and telling the story of Charlie’s mother, Lily, and his grandmother, Ede. As a result, a theatrical adaptation will span the decades from the late 1800s and early 1900s through to the late 1920s and early 1930s, which is why it will be told over the course of two installments.
Garratt says that the details of the performances are still being worked out, but that audiences, depending on when they choose to come and the experience they want to have, will be able to see the show across two nights or all in one day with the performances bookending either a Blyth Festival country supper or an opportunity to dine at one of the village’s restaurants.
Garratt says that The Piano Man’s Daughter is a book with which he has a tremendous personal connection and that he has read several times, so adapting it for the stage is a personal milestone for him. In speaking with The Citizen, Garratt said he was actually privileged enough to have met Findley before he passed away in 2002. Member of the Order of Canada Paul Thompson introduced Garratt and Findley in Stratford at its famed Pazzo restaurant, where Findley would often spend his time when he lived in Stratford.
The endeavour of the two-part play is a big one for the Festival, but Garratt says he’s sure that he and the team in Blyth are up for the challenge.
The second show will be the lone installment outdoors on the Harvest Stage. The Festival has commissioned notable actor, musician and playwright to update his buzzy Bloom: A Rock n’ Roll Fable, which premiered at 4th Line Theatre in Millbrook in 2019.
The tale of the rise and fall of a Canadian rock band, written by Dixon with music and lyrics by Dixon and Dave Tough, is told through the lens of a tense reunion performance that then reaches back and tells the story of the rural Ontario band and its career of performing at fall fairs, battles of the bands and other local institutions.
The show is fun and insightful Garratt said, and full of great music from start to finish.
The band, originally comprised of two men in the 1960s called The Spruce Street Ramblers, changes its composition when they reunite with a stunning female vocalist they knew years ago in their hometown and things really take off for the band as the 1960s turn into the 1970s.
Garratt said that while the show was a hit when it premiered at 4th Line in 2019, it hasn’t been remounted since, so he reached out to Dixon, who he had been wanting to work with for some time, about not just remounting the show, but asking him to update it for the Festival production.
The third show of the season is back in Memorial Hall and it reunites the Festival with Peter N. Bailey, who has been part of past Festival productions as both a playwright and an actor.
Most recently, Bailey played Elijah McCoy, the lead in The Real McCoy in 2023, but he has also acted in The Wilberforce Hotel, Jumbo, World Without Shadows and more.
His new play, Preacher Sings the Blues, has been commissioned by the Festival and has a very direct and distinct link to the Festival itself. Preacher Sings the Blues is an adaptation of the book The Preacher Sings the Blues by Bob Gibson, a long-time Canadian pastor and Festival patron.
Gibson is well-known to many involved with the Festival, including Garratt, who says the pastor has been coming to the Festival for its famed Bonanza Weekend for a number of years. Garratt found that Gibson had released a book about his life, his ministry and his love of blues music in 2018, which is what led to commissioning the play and bringing Bailey on to write it.
Specifically, Garratt was struck by the theatrical nature of an anecdote in the middle of the book in which members of Gibson’s congregation attempted to sue him. He found the story fascinating and that, as well as the rest of the memoir, have formed the basis of the new play.
The fourth and final play of the season will bring acclaimed playwright Sophia Fabiilli back to the Festival just a few years after her Liars at a Funeral opened the 2023 season, marking the return to shows indoors at Memorial Hall after several outdoor-only seasons on the Harvest Stage during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Left To Her Own Devices will tell the story of a woman who celebrates her 60th birthday while at a significant crossroads in her life.
Recently split from her husband, our main character is still living with him - he’s staying in the basement as his new apartment is readied for him and their serial entrepreneur daughter is living upstairs, while she gets regular visits from her best friend. Desperate to take control of her life, she floods her home with every “smart” appliance she can, be it a refrigerator or robot vacuum, but things take a chaotic (and hilarious) turn.
Garratt said that the Festival is so happy to have another Fabiilli production in Blyth after the success of Liars at a Funeral in 2023, a show that has gone on to do gangbusters across the country in the subsequent years.