Two Festivals, Three Opening Nights, and One Very Lucky Theatre Critic – front mezz junkies, Theater News

Frontmezzjunkies reports: A return to the Blyth Festival, a first visit to Guild Festival Theatre, and three opening nights I’m counting down to

By Ross

The summer is always filled with opportunities. Invitations arrive, and suddenly I find myself feeling extraordinarily lucky to be exactly where I am. This season, alongside the Stratford Festival and the Shaw Festival, that feeling is arriving again and again, combining theatre with summertime excursions. This weekend, I’ve been tempted by a long holiday weekend up north on the shores of Lake Huron, packaged with a joyful return to the Blyth Festival for two opening nights. Not only that, the week after I am equally excited to experience Guild Festival Theatre for the first time on the shores of Lake Ontario. The Last Mayor of Rusty River, Off-Island Odyssey, and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey are all waiting for me over the next week, and I am already counting the days.

My relationship with Blyth Festival is no longer a first date. I was there last year for “Emma Donoghue’s sweet and tragic The Wind Coming Over the Sea”, and returning feels a little like coming back to a place where I already know I am going to be greeted with professionalism and talent. Their 2026 season offers five new works of original Canadian theatre, taking over the Margaret Stephens Stage and Harvest Stage with stories rooted in rural communities, labour history, politics, family, sport, belonging, and the particular ability of people to find humour when circumstances become difficult.

That is probably what I find most appealing about Blyth. There is something wonderfully inviting about a festival that can take the particular stories of a place, its people, its history, and its sense of humour, and turn them into theatre that feels made for its audience, whether sitting together under a summer sky or inside their lovely theatre. I loved discovering Blyth last year, and coming back this year feels like getting another chance to spend some time in a theatre community I already know I enjoy. With Kristen Da Silva and Leeann Minogue making their Blyth debuts, alongside returning artists including Kelly McIntosh, David Scott, John Powers, and Gil Garratt, I have a feeling there will be plenty for me to discover all over again.

The production I am especially looking forward to is The Last Mayor of Rusty River, the brand-new musical comedy created by David Scott, John Powers, and Gil Garratt. Opening tonight, July 31, the production takes the simple business of a municipal election and sends it gleefully off the rails when two frustrated councillors decide to run a cat, Captain Whiskers, for mayor. From there, the protest becomes a circus of bluegrass-fuelled showdowns and political shenanigans.

There is an especially delicious bit of reality behind the absurdity. Scott served as both the youngest mayor in Canada and the last mayor of Seaforth before municipal amalgamation, so this musical comedy comes with some genuine lived experience of small-town politics. Add new songs by John Powers and the Blyth Festival‘s commitment to original Canadian work, and I’m even more curious to see what happens when local democracy meets a feline mayoral candidate.

Then comes Off-Island Odyssey, written and performed by Justin Shaw, opening this Sunday, August 2. Shaw’s solo comedy follows a life that has taken him from a PEI horse ranch to Montreal theatre school, the Fort McMurray oil fields, and a dubious Hamilton apartment before bringing him back home again. It is a story about ambition, belonging, and the strange ways home can travel with us, even when we are busy travelling somewhere else.

That premise already has me smiling. Shaw is an Island comedian and Yuk Yuk’s headliner, and the production grows from his sold-out run of Have Jokes, Will Travel at the 2025 Charlottetown Festival. The idea of a solo show turning a life lived in motion into a collection of stories is particularly enticing, especially when the journey involves leaving, returning, and figuring out what exactly we carry with us along the way.

And then, late next week, I get to make my first visit to Guild Festival Theatre, which is an entirely new adventure in theatre-going for me. Located at the iconic Greek Theatre in Guild Park & Gardens, Guild Festival Theatre is Scarborough’s only professional theatre company. Since 2011, it has been presenting theatre, concerts, and special events outdoors throughout July and August. The setting itself is part of the attraction, with classical columns surrounding a festival committed to expanding the idea of what a theatre classic can be.

My first Guild Festival opening night will be Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, adapted and directed by Tyler J. Seguin, whose production of The 39 Steps was last year’s hit. Austen’s heroine Catherine Morland arrives in Bath with an appetite for the latest Gothic novels and an imagination more than willing to supply the missing details when reality proves insufficiently dramatic.

Soon, her holiday becomes an adventure involving friendship, romance, suspicious servants, dark corridors, and the possibility of a terrible family secret. All of it is being brought to life by four actors playing more than twenty characters. Georgia Findlay plays Catherine Morland, joined by Andrew Prashad, Isaiah Kolundzic, and Kiana Woo in the ensemble.

That sounds like exactly the sort of outdoor theatrical adventure I want from a summer festival. Austen’s satire of Gothic fiction already comes with plenty of comic possibilities, and this production promises to embrace the whirlwind, the romance, the mischief, and Catherine’s wonderfully unreliable imagination.

What makes these three opening nights feel especially meaningful to me is the chance to experience two very different festival worlds within the same summer. Blyth is a return, a place I had the good fortune to discover last year and now get to revisit. Guild is a first step into a festival and a venue I have been eager to experience. One feels familiar in the best possible way. The other is an invitation to discover something new.

For a theatre critic, that is a pretty wonderful problem to have. There is never enough time to see everything, but there are moments when the calendar happens to cooperate and offers up exactly the kind of summer adventures I hope for: new Canadian work, familiar artists, new artists, outdoor theatre, musical comedy, solo storytelling, Jane Austen, and the chance to sit in an audience and experience a production as it begins its journey. Somewhere between Captain Whiskers campaigning for mayor, Justin Shaw finding his way home, and Catherine Morland wandering into the glorious chaos of Northanger Abbey, I suspect I will once again find the reason I keep chasing theatre from one stage to another: the possibility of walking into a room, or an outdoor theatre beneath the summer sky, and finding a story that stays with me long after the applause.