2025 Blyth Festival Season Preview with Artistic Director Gil Garratt

We’re back! And we’ve got the scoop on everything you’ll want to see this summer at Canada’s theatre - the Blyth Festival.

Podcast fave and Blyth Fest Artistic Director Gil Garratt is here with his best stories about all five shows in this season’s lineup. The playbill includes two hotly anticipated world premieres, a remounting of a renowned Canadian classic and lots more.

Dive in, and get ready for another summer of amazing Canadian theatre – all home-grown, right here in beautiful Blyth, Ontario. We can’t wait to welcome you to the theatre! 

Tickets on sale now! 1.877.862.5984 | www.blythfestival.com 

Got something to say? Send me your thoughts any time. I read everything you write: jwallace@blythfestival.com 

The Blyth Festival Podcast is presented by our Exclusive Communications Partner, Tuckersmith Communications Co-operative (TCC). Thank you!

Credits: Producer/Host: Joanne Wallace | Sound Designer/Engineer: Jim Park

Music: River Run Dry: Gotta Give Me Something, Easy to Imagine via Epidemic Sound; CKNX Barn Dance: "It's The Saturday Night Barn Dance, Volume 2," 1998 compilation cassette (Rodeo RPL5 8047), featuring artists who performed on the original CKNX Barn Dance, via YouTube/Golden Age Media; CKNX Circle 8 Ranch/Ernie King: My Little Red Wagon, via YouTube.

Chapters

• 2:57 Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion
• 8:00 The Wind Coming Over the Sea
• 13:45 Quiet in the Land
• 24:00 Powers and Gloria
• 29:23 Radio Town: The Doc Cruickshank Story

Transcript

Gil Garratt  00:00

I don't think that the average American questions, if they have an opportunity to go and see Death of a Salesman again, they will do it. If they have the opportunity to go and see Sam Shepard Fool For Love they'll go and do it. If they have a chance to see American Buffalo again, they'll do it. That's exciting. Well, here's an opportunity to see a quintessential, groundbreaking Canadian play and to see fresh interpretations.

Joanne Wallace  00:39

Hi, theatre friends. It's Joanne Wallace, and this is the 2025 season preview episode of The Blyth Festival podcast. Now you just heard artistic director Gil Garrett issuing a kind of call to arms to Canadian theatre lovers. He's asking us to support our homegrown stories and artists and believe in the excellence that has always existed on our stages. And this clip was taken to taken from a spot in our interview where we were talking about how this has always been important, but might be even more so today, given our charged political climate. 

 So we're going to get to my chat with Gil in a minute, and you'll find out which quintessential Canadian play he's talking about. 

 But first I wanted to say, this is our third season, which is kind of amazing for any podcast, let alone a small one dedicated to Canadian theatre. But I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for listening and liking us and subscribing and helping to get the word out about our podcast and about the Blyth Festival. We talk a lot here about how a play is nothing without an audience, but really neither there is a podcast. So thank you again. I'm really happy to count you as one of our loyal listeners. 

 Secondly, I am so excited to tell you that we now have a presenting sponsor, Tuckersmith Communications Co Op is a local Huron County telecom provider, and they have agreed to sponsor our podcast for the next three years, so we're now officially the Blyth Festival podcast presented by Tuckersmith Communications Co Op, and I'll tell you a little more about them at our break. 

 Alrighty, let's get to my conversation with Gil and find out what's in store for you when you come to visit us at Blyth this summer. Gil, you have programmed another fantastic season for us and all of our Blyth Festival friends and supporters, and we need to get right into it, because there's so much to cover. Welcome.

 Gil Garratt  02:52

Thank you for having me.

 Joanne Wallace  02:56

Who else would we have? Okay, let's start. Let's start with the first show that is going to open our 2025, season. And this is a show with a kind of unwieldy title. It's called Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibwe Rebellion, and it's written by the ever amazing Drew Hayden Taylor. So take it away, Gil. What can you tell us about this show.

 Gil Garratt  03:21

This is an absolutely hilarious play Drew. Drew has written this time around, a wonderful piece that looks at history. Looks at how this country came to be. It looks at the memories of the past, and at the same time, is a very contemporary story essentially follows a young man named Bobby Rabbit, and just before the play begins, Bobby has been looking after his ageing grandfather, and on his deathbed, his grandfather reveals to Bobby that when He went into residential school that he had a medicine pouch that was taken away from him, and it ended up in the British Museum in London. And Bobby, after his grandfather dies, decides that he is going to make it his mission to get back this medicine pouch. 

 So he tries to figure out how he's going to do it, and he hatches a plan together with his best friend, Hugh. Hugh is an aspiring rock star who never, probably never gonna make it. No, is he legend in his own mind. So the two of them decide they're gonna go on this road trip on, you know, on the Transcanada Highway 401, all the way to Kingston. And they are going to dig up the remains of John A Macdonald, and they are going to ransom his bones to the Crown until they give back this medicine pouch. 

 And as though this caper were not enough, on top of that, on their way, they pick up a young hitchhiker in. Named Anya. And as they get talking to her, and they kind of develop a bit of trust, they tell her what they're up to, and they get into an argument about John A because it turns out that this particular hitchhiker has a lot of opinions about John A Macdonald. And then to tie it all together, there are also these amazing monologues that come across that are basically broadcasts by John A Macdonald from the 19th century

 Joanne Wallace  05:29

and from the great beyond, like he's exactly, exactly, but he's just the way he was in real life, because he's at his desk and he's got his bottle of scotch and he's pontificating the way, exactly. And

 Gil Garratt  05:41

so we get from him, straight from the mouth of the horse, this sense of not only the history of the country, but also John A's, you know, remarkable work over the course of his life, and also all of his foibles. And I mean everything that that we would want to lampoon him with. 

 Joanne Wallace  06:00

Why did you want to program it for Blyth this summer?

 Gil Garratt  06:06

Well, there's certainly been a lot of talk lately that you may have heard about, of people asking, What does it mean to be a Canadian, and what is Canada, and how do we define ourselves as Canadians? And I really think that this play, I mean, this is obviously the territory that Blyth Festival has been interested in these very questions for 50 years now, 51 years. And I think that this play is emblematic of that search, and in a very delightfully Canadian way, also doesn't take itself very seriously.

 Joanne Wallace  06:46

What can you tell us about the casting? Is there anything you can share with us? Oh,

 Gil Garratt  06:51

yes, absolutely. So, um, so the role of the iconic John A Macdonald himself is will be played by none other than our beloved Randy Hughson, a star of the stage in this country. I don't think there is a board anywhere in this country that Randy has not tread at some point. And he's done quite a number of seasons here at Blyth. And to see him take this on, I think it will be absolutely hilarious. The role of Hugh, the aspiring rock star, will be played by another one of our Blyth faves, James Dallas Smith, who folks will have seen he really shone in cottagers and Indians, another one of Drew Hayden Taylor's plays we did a couple of years ago. He was also prominently featured in our big Donnelly cycle. We've done quite a few shows together. So yeah, I'm so grateful that he's coming back. Very, very funny in this show.

 Joanne Wallace  08:00

The second show on this season's Playbill is called Wind Coming Across the Sea and it's it's going to be remarkable for many things, not least of which is the fact that it's written by one of Canada's most celebrated writers, Emma Donoghue and Gil I think you have an odd story about how on earth you came to be connected to Emma Donoghue.

 Gil Garratt  08:26

I mean, Emma Donoghue, as many of our listeners will know, is a literary Titan. I mean, all over the world. I mean, she was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, right? She her adaptation of her own play Room was nominated for an Oscar, right? I mean, she's won an incredible number of awards, and that's those are just a couple, and incredibly prolific. I think she's now written 17 novels, quite a few plays. 

 But funnily enough, in 2020, the year that shall not speak its name, and theatres all over the country were closed. We put out an appeal, because we were facing this unbelievably challenging time, and we didn't know how we were going to make it through. And we reached out to our members and our donors, and we said, Please, we need help, and there was such an inspirational outpouring. So many folks contributed, and people phoned in, and they made donations, and they really they saved our Canadian bacon. 

 And as I was making my way down the list, calling all these amazing folks to thank them. Which one of the things I wanted to do was just call everybody personally and say thank you, because it meant so much. As I'm making my way down the list, I come across this name Emma Donoghue, and she'd made a significant little donation. And I thought, Well, that can't be the Emma Donoghue. You. And so I called her, and sure enough, she answered the phone, and we got chatting on the phone. I just thanked her profusely. And it turned out that she has been a secret fan for many years, and coming and seeing shows at the Blyth Festival, and she told me all about how much she loved The Pigeon King and all these plays that she had seen over the years and and she was just, you know, so overjoyed to be able to help us. So that was my first introduction, and I was just chuffed. 

 And then very soon after, we got a wonderful new board member, a man named Michael Milde, who is the former Dean of Arts at Western University an amazing board member, and he, turns out, is very close personal friends with Emma. And so I guess the two of them were out for coffee, and they got talking about Blyth Festival, and Emma let him know that there was actually a play idea that she had that she wanted to pitch at the company. And so we got in touch, and she and I passed back and forth a couple of different ideas, and then she landed on this phenomenal piece that she'd been carrying around for years, which was the inspiration a short story that she had started for Wind Coming Across the Sea.

 Joanne Wallace  11:23

So So you commissioned this piece from Emma, and can you tell us what it's about?

 Gil Garratt  11:31

So it was inspired by a collection of real letters that Emma found in the library in London, Ontario. They were part of the archives there. And what they are are actual letters that were sent between a young couple, Henry Connell and Jane Connell, and they were in their early 20s. They had two little babies, and they were living in Northern Ireland in the midst of the potato famine, and they had a little General Store and everything collapsed in their community. And they decided that they were going to leave Ireland, and they were going to make the voyage, as so many did at that time, to come and start their I mean, as so many do today, yeah, to make this decision, to come here to Canada, start their lives over, 

 And what they did was Henry went ahead, and Jane stayed back in Ireland with the two little babes, and Henry went ahead to try to get a job and find a home and get them settled. And for 18 months they were separated. And during the course of that time, they wrote letters to each other and mailed them and they went across the sea. And so what she wanted to do was take these letters and stage them verbatim. So we have these beautiful letters are written right into the text of the play, and then it's also interwoven with all of these beautiful Irish traditional Irish folk songs that are played live as part of the show.

 Joanne Wallace  13:03

So is this a kind of musical where we're gonna have a pit band, or will there be a band on stage, or what's going to happen there?

 Gil Garratt  13:10

So this is one of those magical Blyth moments that I think our audience are always so excited by, so that the performers that we've cast for this show between the six performers who do the whole play. They play all the characters. They tell the whole story. They also between the six of them, all of this music that will be played live by the actors themselves as they're telling the story. 

 Joanne Wallace  13:45

Now on the Harvest Stage Gil. What do we have coming this summer?

 Gil Garratt  13:51

This is an opportunity for our audience to take in what I think is widely regarded as a quintessential Canadian classic. We are reviving Anne Chislett’s Quiet in the Land. This just a play. It was one of the biggest hits that Blyth Festival ever produced. It began here in 1980 and it went all over the country, all over the world.

 Joanne Wallace  14:18

I'm sure Gil, many people across this country are familiar with this play, and we've revived it ourselves a number of times, but not for many years. But can you, for people who maybe aren't familiar with it yet, give us the lowdown on what this story is about.

 Gil Garratt  14:36

So it entirely takes place in an old order Amish community, and there's a man in the community, a widower who has been raising his teenage son all by himself. The man's name is Christy Bauman, and essentially, the local bishop is stepping down and. So it's time for the community to appoint a new bishop, and Christy gets tapped to be the next in line. And so at this moment, when Christy is about to become the community's new bishop, his own son, Yock, who is 18 years old, Yock, now has the opportunity to go and be baptised and join his community, but he feels a different calling, and what he ends up doing is he enlists to go and fight in the First World War. 

 Joanne Wallace  15:47

Gil, there's a lot to unpack here. There's a father son conflict. There's a faith community versus the secular world conflict. And there's also, I don't see what what Yock has struggles with in some of these beautiful monologues you mentioned, is something that's probably very familiar to many of our new Canadians today, which is that question about, what does an immigrant community owe to its New its new country that has welcomed it from perhaps persecution and any other number of traumas that are going on in their home country. So I think that's one of the reasons why I find this play so relevant, particularly today. But can you speak to some of these things?

 Gil Garratt  16:40

This very much, is a play about immigrant communities and being outside. It's also a play. I think one thing that's really powerful about it is this portrait of Canada as a place for people who are persecuted for their religious beliefs to come to too. I think that that has been certainly a part of our history. And, you know, you think about something like the Amish, like the Doukhobors, and I think that sort of sense of religious freedom and freedom of conscience too. I mean, that's definitely what Yock is struggling with. 

 But the other piece at the core of this too, in in Quiet in the Land, is the divide, the technological divide between generations. I think that's something we feel really poignantly right now. I mean, as a parent of a couple of teenagers, the technological divide between, you know, the world that I grew up in. I when I was a teenager, there was, still was no internet or certainly not a public one that we were all accessing. And, you know, the world that my teenagers are growing up in is completely changed, and these kinds of things that they impact perspective on the world and impact our ability to understand each other. And I think that really gets foregrounded in Quiet in the Land.

 Joanne Wallace  17:59

Yeah, that's true, because they these two men. They love each other so much, but there's so so much dissent between them. Can you tell us worlds? Yeah, they do. But can you tell us who's going to be bringing these parts to life? Who have you cast?

 Gil Garratt  18:15

Yes. So these roles in the original plays. One wonderful thing about this play is there are, you know, 10 really meaty, wonderful roles for actors. And you get a portrait of this whole community. And when we did these plays in the past, some of our greats were starred in them. And so this time around, the role of Christy Bauman will be played by Randy Hughson. Oh, and the role of yoke will be played by a relatively new face, but up and coming member of the company here in Blyth Landon Doak, oh yes, we also have the return of one of our true grandams here, Michelle Fisk will be coming back to play the role of Hannah lovely and, yeah, that's an amazing, amazing cast.

 Joanne Wallace  19:15

I’m excited to see Landon come back. And for those of you listening who are members of the Blyth Festival, and you will have read a profile I wrote on Landon and Shelayna [Christante], his partner, who was also here last year in the farmerettes in the members magazine. So yeah, he's a wonderful young man. Very excited to see him coming back. 

 You've been listening to the 2025 season preview episode of The Blyth Festival podcast. My guest is Blyth artistic director, Gil Garrett, and we still have lots to cover, like, Who exactly is Mary Poppins with acid wash jeans and a bare midriff? Or why are people paying paying $900 a pop to see another production of Othello, and you'll find out about a very special cameo appearance at Blyth this summer. 

 But first, I want to give a shout out to our new presenting sponsor, Tuckersmith communications Co Op TCC, as they are known, are a full service telecom provider serving Huron County since 1909 they started with dial up phone service, and they now offer everything from fibre optic systems to security monitoring services. And of course, they're enormously community minded. They support dozens of local charities, and we are so proud that they are now our exclusive communications partner. So big thanks to the good people at TCC. 

 And now let's get back to my conversation with Gil and find out about these $900 tickets to Othello!

 Gil before we wrap up this discussion about Quiet in the Land, I want to ask you something. Because I was speaking to a member one day about this play, and she said to me, Oh, I love that show, but I saw this, you know, seminal production of it, at the Stratford Festival a number of years ago. I just, I can't bear to see another another show, another production of it. So I just was wondering, if people are feeling that way, what, what do you have to say about this business? About why would you want to see a play again, if you've seen it before?

 Gil Garratt  21:35

I think that's a wonderful question. I mean, one of my first thoughts would be, you know, who else could you send? First of all, because obviously, if this is a play that touched you so profoundly, then it's one that you want to send your friends and your neighbours and your family to go and see this thing that moved me so deeply. But beyond that, I think there is kind of a funny, parochial sort of Canadian thing that we do, you know, certainly we would never question seeing A Midsummer Night's Dream 15 times every summer outdoors. You know, Shakespeare in the park. We never question that, right and even right now on Broadway, there's a new production of Othello happening, and people are going there, and they're actually paying there was big story in The New York Times, folks are paying $921 a ticket to see this production of Othello. Certainly seen Othello before. I mean, we as Canadians living in 2025 have the privilege of there being 50 Years of plays that have been developed just at the Blyth Festival. We've had decades of plays being written by some of our greats. And I think we need to develop a culture where we are interested in seeing those plays again. I don't think that the average American questions, you know, if they have an opportunity to go and see Death of a Salesman again, they will do it. If they have the opportunity to go and see Sam Shepard Fool For Love, they'll go and do it. If they have a chance to see American Buffalo again, they'll do it. That's exciting. You know, people go back to see Phantom of the Opera again. Well, here's an opportunity to see a quintessential, groundbreaking Canadian play and to see fresh interpretation, see other actors take it on, see a director like Severn Thompson take this on…

 Joanne Wallace  23:33

This play. I mean, this is just something that we have to overcome our Canadian reticence about blowing our own horns. And so this play is every bit as good as any play written in any country, anywhere on this planet. It's fantastic. Everybody should come and see it next up, we have a revival of another play that we commissioned 20 years ago called Powers and Gloria, written by a very special local playwright. So Gil please. What can you tell us about this?

 Gil Garratt  24:18

So this play was written by one of the most produced playwrights here at Blyth, a man named Keith Roulston. And Keith, as many will know, was one of our founders. He was also a general manager here and served on the board for many years. 

 Keith wrote this play in 2005 about a local titan of industry, a man named Edward Powers, who has built a furniture factory where most of the town have their jobs. They work there, and he, just before the story begins, has suffered health setbacks, had a stroke, and he is laid out, and his son has to take over the business, and his. John, James actually went and studied an Ivy League school. Has big business degree, and he has big plans for what he's going to do with this plant. 

 And James, at the time, he's thinking about taking this plant and going global with it, offshoring the jobs, making all kinds of profit, and into this comes a young woman named Gloria, and she gets hired to help Edward powers do his rehab exercises and kind of be his personal assistant, get him back on his feet. And she has grown up in the town. Her parents actually work in the plant, and she has some pretty strident opinions about the way things are done. And between the two of them, Edward Powers, who's a bit of a cantankerous old man, and this young single mother, Gloria, the two of them form an incredible rivalry and a very unlikely and powerful friendship that helps the two of them completely change the way that they see the world and the way that they interact. 

 Joanne Wallace  26:08

I read the script for this play. I haven't seen it, of course, because I wasn't around 20 years ago, and I came away from it feeling I'm not sure how this, all these different stories are going to fit together, because it seems to me, there's these three major conflicts going on. Because first of all, you've got Edward and James, the father and son conflict going on. And then you've got the sort of business conflict represented by both Edward and James, because Edward is very old fashioned and paternalistic and kind of feels like a business should be run a certain way, the way it's always been run. And James has been, you know, to an Ivy League school, and he wants to go global and increase shareholder value. And that sort of conflict is going on. And then you also get this kind of head butting class conflict, almost between Edward and Gloria, because she's very much from, I don't want to say the wrong side of the tracks, but let's say a different side of the tracks that Edward is from. So how do these three strands all come together, and why is the main focus of the play in the end, about Edward and Gloria?

 Gil Garratt  27:25

Well, I don't want to give it all away, but I will say that Gloria, who does arrive and can be pretty abrasive, and asserts herself at the same time, I think she really gives Edward Powers a run for his money, and at the end of the day, as much as he imparts on her some other ways of thinking about her life and her future, I think that she impacts him in a similarly transformative way, where she forces him to think about, not only this wider project of all of his efforts to, you know, be the great, you know, paternal force in the community. I think she also really brings him to see his responsibilities as a father, and that if James is, you know, so focused on global trade and not thinking about the neighbours who depend on the factory, then maybe there is actually a fissure that needs to be repaired in that relationship between father and son.

 Joanne Wallace  28:37

Oh, I see. So she's, she's like a modern um, Mary Poppins.

 Gil Garratt  28:45

Like Mary Poppins in acid wash jeans and mid, mid riff, you know,

 Joanne Wallace  28:50

Tattoos, yeah. So she has to come and and repair the relationship between the Father and the Son so that that everything that has gone wrong in I both of their lives can be sorted out.

 Gil Garratt  29:02

Yeah, and I think at the same time, Edward Powers, you know, dares her to explore her own potential, too. You

 Joanne Wallace  29:23

Let's move on to our last our last play, which is, I mean, each one of these shows is increasingly special as we're going through this conversation, but tell us about this, the last show that's going to open this summer.

 Gil Garratt  29:38

The last show of the season is one that we've been dreaming about for a number of years. This has been written by a young guy named Nathan Howe, who's done a few seasons with us here in Blyth. He was in Wing night at the boot. He is just a wonderful writer performer, and Nathan wanted to what he told me was as an artist, he wanted to write a. Love Letter to Huron County. He wanted to write a love letter to Huron County. Oh, and so, what could that be? And I pitched him on writing a play about the life and work of Doc Cruickshank.

 Joanne Wallace  30:15

Okay, now, for anybody who's not from Huron County, you're gonna have to explain who was Doc Cruickshank, and why is he so important. 

 Gil Garratt  30:25

So in the 1920s a man named Wilford Cruickshank. His nickname was doc, because he drove a delivery truck for the local pharmacy. Doc Cruickshank, he was a tinkerer, and he used to go into his garage and play with all kinds of things. And he, legend has it, opened up a Popular Mechanics magazine, and there was a how to build your own radio transmitter, instructions that he followed with tubes and transistors, and he built himself a little radio transmitter in his garage and started broadcasting out.

 Joanne Wallace  31:00

So this is a story about, I don't know what you could maybe call our last wave of seriously disruptive technology, before we had the internet.

 Gil Garratt  31:13

Well, yeah, I mean, I wonder if disruptive is the word. What's amazing about what doc did with this local radio was that he pulled the community together, you know, rather than the moment that we're living in right now, where everybody's feed algorithmically splits us all apart until we're all in our own bubbles and have our own vision of the way things are, you know, where the person who you're sitting beside on the bus has a different, you know, news feed than you do. Instead, what doc was doing in Wingham, Ontario, was he was putting local people on the air so that local people could hear the stories, could hear the sermons, could hear local music, could hear local news. And this actually stitched the community together and brought people together in a meteoric way …

 [CKNX Barn Dance Clip]

 Joanne Wallace  32:25

and also, can you say a little bit about, like, what was the radio? And I don't think we've mentioned this. The play itself is called Radio Town: the Doc Cruickshank Story, and it happens in the late 20s, I guess, and then throughout the evolution of CKNX, which turned out to be quite a going concern in the history of Canadian Broadcasting. But I think it's important to understand what the radio landscape was at the time, to understand how revolutionary this was. So can you speak about that?

 Gil Garratt  32:58

So the radio landscape at this time, really, all you had access to, you know, you turn your dials, you could get CBC, and if you were lucky, you could get some broadcasters coming out of the United States. That was all you had. And there was no local radio. 

 And Doc Cruickshank, what he did when he when he got his, you know, commercial licence to be able to have this radio station, which he initially wanted to call J, O, k, e, joke radio, but instead he got assigned CKNX. He also would put local musicians on. So, for instance, Earl Haywood, who was a local singer songwriter, young man at the time, knocked on the door and said, Hey, can I get on your radio? Can I play one of my songs on your radio? And Doc said, Sure, and that would grow not only to a huge following for Earl Haywood, but over time, Doc started welcoming more and more musicians into the studio, and then created something called the Saturday Night Barn Dance which was an enormous radio show that was, you know, they had house bands. There was a house band called The Ranch Boys that they used to play 300 dances a year all over Huron County, and then they would play us every Saturday night on the radio. 

 You also had, over time, that radio station grew to also be a television station, where they had something called the circle eight Ranch, hosted by a man named Ernie King, who a lot of listeners will have heard that name before. And Ernie and the house band would welcome guests. They had people like Tommy Hunter on there. They had people like Al Cherney. They had a very young Shania Twain on there. So this was so special. 

 And not only did you have these huge stars of country music, what was extraordinary about this was the number of local musicians who were making a living performing. And playing just down the road in Wingham, Ontario, you know, so that people in the grocery store, you're standing in the lettuce aisle, you're squeezing a head of lettuce, and beside you is the star of the show that you watched last night, right? Your neighbour is the star of the show that you heard on the radio on Saturday night. 

 Joanne Wallace  35:35

I wanted to ask too, because I think we're calling this country musical. So we are going to hear music. Are we having a band on stage for this show?

 Gil Garratt  35:44

So there are going to be all kinds of songs that are in this we've got a bunch of numbers that are Earl Haywood tunes. I think there might be a Mercy Brothers tune in there. There's a bunch of music from the Ranch Boys from all this kind of era of local music. We are going to put it live on stage with our own amazing team of actor musicians. We're going to play all kinds of things, and it is entirely possible that I myself might also make a little cameo in this show. 

 Joanne Wallace  36:19

What is this? Breaking news on the podcast? Breaking news. Tell us, Gil, what are you? What are you going to do? 

 Gil Garratt  36:28

I can't yet reveal may or may not be playing, but I can't tell you, I will also be picking up some instruments and joining the band to fill out the sound. 

 Joanne Wallace  36:40

Not all of our listeners may know this, but Gil is quite a skilled banjo player, so I think this alone is a reason to come to Blyth this summer. But let me just segue into my sign off question, which I always love to ask whoever I'm speaking to, what are your top three reasons that everybody should come to Blyth this summer,

 Gil Garratt  37:03

All across the country this year, summer 2025 there is a wellspring of Canadian pride that I think people are really feeling, and this is an opportunity to come together hear Canadian stories told by Canadian actors on a quintessential Canadian stage. And have that feeling of why this matters. 

And I think too, I mean, I've talked about this many, many times like this looks like a theatre. You know this? This building looks like a theatre and the Harvest Stage looks like a theatre. But what these actually are are community building machines, and that's what they're for. They're for building community. 

 And if we come together and we sit in that same space and we share the same you know, two hour long dream of this is what life is like. This is what it feels like to fall in love. This is what it feels like to have a dream and follow through. This is what it feels like to try to honour my grandfather. This is what it feels like to write across the sea to my beloved. If we can do that together and feel that same feeling. It changes us. We come away connected to each other in a way that we otherwise simply can't achieve connection.

 Joanne Wallace  38:30

I agree 100% and it's just, you know, hey, Canada, we are your theatre. We've been producing, writing, creating Canadian stories, telling Canadian history, doing it all for 50 years. We're here for you here this summer. And I don't think you're going to find any other theatre experience across this country that's going to be so fantastic, because what we've got on stage this summer in Blyth Festival, I can't wait to see everything.

 Gil Garratt  38:58

Neither can I.

 Joanne Wallace  39:02

Oh, all right. Thanks. Everybody. See you next time. Bye. 

 You've been listening to artistic director Gil Garrett here on the Blyth Festival podcast. I hope you are as excited as I am about all this amazing Canadian theatre coming your way this summer in Blyth, Ontario. 

 If you've never been here, we're about two and a half hours west of Toronto, maybe three on a bad traffic day, we're about an hour and a half north ish of London. And if you're closer than that, like you're in Goderich or Clinton or Wingham, well, we're closer than you think, so come on out and see us. 

 Tickets just went on sale, and I hear that they are selling quite briskly. So give our box office a call or head on over to our website, that's www.blythfestival.com and get your tickets for this summer now here on the podcast, we have lots more planned for you this season, as you. As usual, we are going to be talking to actors. We're going to talk to directors and playwrights, and we're going to bring you the kind of insider and background information that we know you love. So stay tuned. Make sure you like and subscribe so you don't miss an episode 

 If you've got friends and they want to get a little more intentional about supporting Canadian arts and artists. Let them know about Blyth, let them know about our podcast, and bring them with you when you come. One of the greatest things you can do to support our Canadian actors and other theatre artists is to encourage people to come to the theatre and bring them with you. 

 Thank you so much. I'm Joanne Wallace until next time, thanks for listening.