Village Squire, 1978-06, Page 12Last year at the Blyth Summer Festival a small town fought big government in a play by Keith
Roulston. This year the playwright returns with a comedy about a businessman who has to fight big
problems.
Impossible
dream
Blyth Summer Festival
has proven itself
against all odds
Theatres featuring Canadian plays in the summer are few and
' far between, and they're getting fewer.
With the recent demise of the Peterborough Summer Festival
the only two Canadian summer theatres left• are the Lennoxville
Festival in Quebec and the Blyth Summer Festival. Both are
ironic successes, Lennoxville because it's an English language
PG. 10. VILLAGE SQUIRE/JUNE 1978.
theatre in a French province and Blyth because who'd expect a
threatre at all in a village of 900 people that isn't a traditional
tourist town, let alone a• theatre doing Canadian plays mostly
from original scripts.
This latter feature is the one that makes Blyth truly unique.
With five original productions planned this summer it is
presenting as many premieres as any of the more established
theatres in the country. Under Artistic Director James Roy the
Festival has grown from two plays its first season in 1975 to five
original works this year. Audiences grew from 3000 that first
summer to more than 12,000 for the four host productions last
year and tickets sales for this year are running well ahead of any
previous season.
Equally impressive things have been happening at Memorial
Hall, the home of the Festival. That first season customers stuck
to the old varnish on the seats in the hot, humid weather. By the
next season the sticky seats were gone with a complete
redecoration of the theatre sponsored by the Festival's parent
body Blyth Centre for the Arts. This year if all goes well, the heat
problem will be gone too with work beginning son on