Blyth Festival 2024: J.D. Nicholsen is back on the Memorial Hall stage
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
To paraphrase one of Canada’s great singer-songwriters, J.D. Nicholsen’s been everywhere, man. His theatrical career has brought him to the stage of theatres all over Canada, from Toronto to Edmonton to Calgary to Vancouver, and he also has over 50 film and television credits. He’s even won a Juno Award! But for the Blyth Festival’s 50th anniversary season, there’s nowhere else he would consider being than Huron County. Nicholsen’s turn as Gordon in Gil Garratt’s Saving Graceland will be the veteran actor’s ninth season with the Festival and as he had recently arrived in town to begin preparing for his upcoming role, The Citizen caught up with him on the streets of Blyth to talk about how he’s feeling about being a part of this landmark season.
It turns out he couldn’t be more excited.
“It’s an extraordinary honour. I was here in 1996 - my first season - and I thought that was pretty special, but to be part of 50 years, that’s just really exciting! It’s hard to keep a theatre going that long, and I just have an extreme love for this place! I love that there’s just always a really great group of people to work with here. They get the best people. And I love the work they do here. I’ll come back until the day I die!”
Before that first show in Blyth, Nicholsen had been a professional musician who had lost the spark for playing music. That show, Barn Dance Live!, told the true story of how nearby Wingham, Ontario had grown from an ordinary rural town to a genuine cultural hub for Canadian country music. Taking to the stage as a member of the Barn Dance Band rekindled Nicholsen’s love of music. “It reconnected me with my country roots, so I started listening to old country again, and really getting into it. Once we finished that project I came back to Toronto, and I told my wife at the time, ‘I think I’m gonna start a country band.’” Nicholsen did start that country band, and the Cameron Family Singers began bringing old-time country to the city.
Barn Dance Live! was a theatrical project mounted by Paul Thompson, who was also one of the creators of The Farm Show, which inspired the formation of the Blyth Festival 50 years ago. An updated version, The Farm Show: Then and Now, is being produced on the Harvest Stage this season to mark the occasion, and Nicholsen is planning to be there. “I’m really excited to see The Farm Show. I’ve seen The Clinton Special and had the great fortune of being in the band that backed up Michael Ondaatje when he did his readings back in the late 90s/early 2000s. But I’m also very excited to see Birgitte Solem’s murder mystery play [Resort to Murder]. And I’m excited to see the Farmerettes play [Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz: The Farmerettes]! It’s going to be an epic season.”
His life as an actor began when Nicholsen was in elementary school. “In Grade 4, I was a Martian in a play for Halloween, and I fell in love with it.” In 1984, he became involved with the Toronto theatre scene after a trip with friends that went on a little longer than expected. “We weren’t going to move here, we were coming from out west in Calgary to check out the theatre scene - you know, ‘what are they doing in Toronto?’ And I just never went back.”
The script for Saving Graceland feels to Nicholsen as though it was tailor-made for him. It tells the story of a Huron County family laughing their way through a crisis on the eve of the Collingwood Elvis Festival. “Gil sent me the script, and he said ‘I’ve got a play for you.’ I looked at it and I thought ‘oh my God, what an amazing story! I totally connect with the dysfunction in the family, and the separation of a child from their parents - there’s a history of that in my family. There’s addiction and mental illness in my family as well. So there’s lots in there, emotionally that I can connect to, and dig into. And Elvis is fun! He’s a lot of fun.” Beyond feeling a personal connection to the themes in the story, he fell in love with the conflicted, complex characters, and the way Garratt’s writing made them feel real. On his first read through, Nicholsen got choked up, but he also laughed a lot.
The Festival has lucked out in casting Nicholsen in the role of Elvis super-fan Gord - he can draw from his own Elvis experience for the role. “I loved Elvis as a child. And my mother was a huge fan. When I was seven, I got 50,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong, I Got Lucky and Flaming Star. And we watched all the movies. My mom is such a huge fan and I would do little impersonations for her and her friends... my mother had this fantasy that one day, I would be an Elvis impersonator. She slept in her bedroom for three days after he died. We did not see her.” Even though he’s a real-life fan, he doesn’t mind that co-star Caroline Gillis has different musical tastes. “I was thrilled when Caroline was cast in the show,” he confirmed.
Nicholsen knows that the same things that make Garratt’s script resonate with him will ring true to a lot of audiences attending the show. “There’s a lot of important themes in there. It’s about addiction and separation. There are dreams realized and dreams dashed. It’s really about people struggling to articulate themselves. This show kind of opens it up and says ‘Look, it’s alright. It’s OK to talk about this stuff.’ I think it lets people articulate what’s happening to them.”