Blyth Festival Launches 50th Season In June

by Bob Montgomery

Artistic Director Gil Garratt says the first play of the fiftieth anniversary season for the Blyth Festival is exactly what you would expect it to be – a huge celebration piece looking back at how it all started – called The Farm Show: Then & Now.

Garratt says in 1972 a group of artists lead by Paul Thompson, who had been working at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto spent a summer living and volunteering with farmers in the Clinton area. They got to know all of the farmers and gathered several stories and created scenes that they performed in a barn. “The whole community came out and there's photographs of it with people sitting up in the rafters and on hay bails and it absolutely changed the landscape out here. You had these friendships that had just blossomed between the artists and farmers and a lot of these relationships would go on to last fifty years.”

Garratt says what they wanted to do was shine a light on what would become the Blyth Festival. Many of the people who were founders of the Blyth Festival were in the barn that night and all of the artists that performed in that show came back and worked at the Blyth Festival several times. 

It only seemed fitting to bring back the show that started it all and what could be more fitting than performing it on the outdoor Harvest Stage. Garratt describes it as an incredible portrait of a place and a time.

The Farm Show: Then & Now opens on Wednesday, June 12th on the outdoor Harvest Stage.

The Farm Show: Then & Now.
Front row: Angela Mae Bago, Alison Lobb, Gil Garratt
Back row: Jennifer Triemstra-Johnston, Fiona Mongillo, Landon Doak, Jamie Mac, Geoffrey Armour, Hallie Seline, Sandy Plunkett (production stage manager)

- Photo courtesy of Beth Kates