The Blyth Festival Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Roll back the clock to the summer of 1977. The kitchen is avocado green. Rod Stewart is on the radio. Somewhere somebody is wearing platform shoes and entirely too much Love's Baby Soft. And a group of young women in Centralia, Ontario are about to make Canadian history. Playwright Kristen Da Silva joins host Joanne Wallace to talk about Sisters of '78, her powerful new...

Send us Fan Mail Everybody, play ball! Step into the world of Curveball - a lively new Canadian musical set in 1950s Stratford, where a championship women's ball team and a brand-new Shakespeare festival are about to collide. Playwright Kelly McIntosh and singer-songwriter Dayna Manning talk about how this show has grown, from its early days as a one-act play to the full-scale musical you&apo...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back! Artistic Director Gil Garratt joins us for a full preview of the Blyth Festival’s 2026 season — five shows, four (and a half!) world premieres, and a summer full of stories.  ----------------------- Podcast regular (and Blyth Fest Artistic Director) Gil Garratt is here to walk us through all five shows in the 2026 season. And, as always, he’s got stories. From a powe...

Send us Fan Mail A visionary broadcaster. A small-town station with big dreams. A new Canadian play with live music straight from the dawn of Canadian country music. About This Episode In this episode, actor and playwright Nathan Howe takes us behind the scenes of his brand-new play, Radio Town: The Doc Cruickshank Story . The play chronicles the remarkable journey of Doc Cruickshank, the small-to...

Send us Fan Mail Keith Roulston — playwright, journalist, and Blyth Festival co-founder — joins us to talk about his sharp, funny, and quietly moving play Powers and Gloria , now returning to the Blyth stage nearly 20 years after its premiere. In this intimate conversation, Keith reflects on the inspiration behind the story, the complicated relationships at its heart, and what it means to revisit...

Send us Fan Mail Back in 1981, the Blyth Festival premiered an unusual play about a group of immigrant Amish farmers struggling with Canada’s introduction of Conscription in 1917.  Against all expectations, this play - Quiet in the Land - became a sensation. It played across the country and around the world, and scooped up both Governor General’s and Chalmers Canadian Play Awards. Written by Blyth...

Send us Fan Mail You may know bestselling author Emma Donoghue for her 2010 novel Room (later an Oscar-nominated movie), or her most recent book, The Paris Express. But Emma is also an accomplished playwright. And this summer she has a brand new work premiering right here at the Blyth Festival.  Join me for a fascinating chat with Emma about this new work: The Wind Coming Over the Sea. The play fe...

Send us Fan Mail What do you suppose would happen if two Indigenous dudes decided to dig up the bones of Sir John A. Macdonald, and hold them ransom until the Canadian government returned something that had been stolen decades ago? You'll have to see Drew Hayden Taylor's hilarious road trip/musical/historical comedy Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion to find out. But in t...

Send us Fan Mail 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 i...

Send us Fan Mail We all know about Rosie the Riveter and the women who kept our factories afloat during WWII. But did you know thousands of young women (some as young as 16)  took to our fields and farms as well? These girls kept the country (and the troops) fed, but their contribution was largely forgotten once the war was over. The Blyth Festival sets out to right this wrong with a new play call...

Send us Fan Mail Rural Ontario isn't exactly known as a hotbed of paranormal activity. But it turns out Canada's last official charge of witchcraft was laid right here in Huron County. In 1919. Yes, you read that correctly. A Canadian woman was charged with witchcraft long after the telephone, the radio and the automobile had been invented. And playwright Beverley Cooper confronts this ...

Send us Fan Mail Fifty years ago this summer, an actor, a playwright and a newspaper editor walked into a bar ....  OK, kidding, it wasn't a bar. But James Roy, Anne Chislett and Keith Roulston DID sit down in Keith's living room and decide to start a summer theatre festival in Blyth, Ontario. Miraculously, nobody told them they were crazy. Fifty years later, theatre-lovers around the wo...

Send us Fan Mail In the long, hot summer of 1972, a group of barefoot Toronto actors made their way to an abandoned farm house in Clinton, Ontario. There they began a theatrical experiment that would result in a collective creation known as The Farm Show. Quite possibly the most influential play in Canadian-theatre history, The Farm Show became a massive run-away hit and an international phenomeno...

Send us Fan Mail Need help choosing what to see at Blyth this summer? We've got you covered! Playwright, actor, and avid Huron-County historian Kelly McIntosh walks us through all six shows on Blyth's 2024 playbill in this episode. Kelly has appeared on stages across the country, and will be familiar to Blyth audiences as co-writer of In The Wake of Wettlaufer and The Outdoor Donnellys ....

Send us Fan Mail Have you ever thought A Christmas Carol is just a bit … quaint? Old fashioned? A nice period piece,  but without much relevance to the modern world? Well, buckle up. The Blyth Festival’s Huron County Christmas Carol drops the classic story right into modern-day Huron County.  Here Ebenezer Scrooge has bought up every feed mill in southwestern Ontario, and everyone else can barely...

Send us Fan Mail Actor Andrew Moodie burst onto the scene as a playwright in 1995 with Riot , an exploration of the 1992 Yonge Street Riot that followed the Rodney King uprisings in LA. Since then, Andrew has written many more  plays bringing Black Canadian stories and voices to our stages. These include The Real McCoy , the story of a gifted young African Canadian engineer who revolutionized stea...

Send us Fan Mail Part two of our in-depth conversation with Blyth Festival Artistic Director Gil Garratt about his revival of James Reaney’s landmark Donnelly trilogy. Today Gil tells us about the design and staging of his new productions, and about the changes he’s made to Reaney’s original works for this production. He also talks about the Blyth audience’s particular affinity for this story, as...

Send us Fan Mail In the wee small hours of February 4, 1880, an angry mob descended on a farmstead in Lucan.  An hour later, five people were dead, and the farmhouse was in flames.  This shocking piece of Canadian history – known as the Donnelly Massacres – was first dramatized in a trio of plays written by James Reaney in the 1970s. All three shows have been abridged and updated by Blyth Festival...

Send us Fan Mail Matt Murray started writing plays and musicals after a 20-year career as a musical-theatre performer – and he’s never looked back. His new comedy,  Chronicles of Sarnia, opened this summer at the Blyth Festival.  Matt and host Joanne Wallace discuss the craft of writing comedy for the stage and the role the audience plays in that process. Matt also shares what inspired him to writ...