Blyth Festival at 50: Katherine Kaszas leads Festival into unprecedented success
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
When it came time for Janet Amos to pass the artistic director baton in the mid-1980s after a tremendously successful six-season stint, she turned to Katherine Kaszas, who was still in her 20s at the time, to continue growing the Blyth Festival. And grow it she did.
Kaszas took over in the Blyth Festival’s top position and brought forth a five-show season in 1985. It opened with Brian Wade’s Polderland, Moose Country by Colleen Curran, Beaux Gestes and Beautiful Deeds by Marie-Lynn Hammong, Ted Galay’s Primrose School District 109 and Garrison’s Garage by Ted Johns.
The Festival was in good shape thanks to the hard work of co-founder James Roy, who got it off the ground as the artistic director from 1975-1979, and Amos, who had ushered in a new era that includes some of the Festival’s most successful productions, like Anne Chislett’s Quiet in the Land, Ted Johns’ He Won’t Come in From the Barn and Peter Colley’s I’ll Be Back Before Midnight.
Kaszas had met Amos when she was directing a show at Theatre Passe Muraille and Kaszas said she begged Amos for an opportunity at the Blyth Festival, admiring the work that was being done there, and Amos relented and a very young Kaszas was the Festival’s newest stage manager.
Kaszas, an Ottawa native, came of age in the world of theatre at a time of great change in Canada. The Blyth Festival and some of the landmark Toronto theatres like Theatre Passe Muraille, and the Factory and Tarragon Theatre were just getting their feet under them and the work they were doing, telling Canadian stories in Canadian theatres, was regarded as pretty radical for the time, Kaszas says.
It’s hard to overstate, she said, the impact of something like The Farm Show on theatre students at the time. She was immediately intrigued with the changing landscape of Canadian theatre and wanted to be part of it.
For her first season at the Blyth Festival, Kaszas was the stage manager for the 1980 productions of St. Sam of the Nuke Pile and The House That Jack Built. She would be back again, but then take a few seasons off, not wanting to be pigeonholed as a stage manager, but wanting to direct her own shows.
She would return and serve as an assistant director on some shows and then, when the time came for Amos to move on from the Blyth Festival and take on the role of artistic director at Theatre New Brunswick, Amos asked Kaszas if she’d be interested in applying for her old job.
She was, so she did and Kaszas was chosen to be the third artistic director in the Blyth Festival’s history. Kaszas said she had had tremendous mentorship from not only Amos, but directors she greatly admired, like Miles Potter and Layne Coleman.
Having the support and confidence of both Amos and Johns was a big boost, Kaszas said, so she got to work. She did so with the help of a lot of amazing people, she said, which is something that is so special about the Blyth Festival. Kaszas says that the people who work for the Festival are so committed to the mandate of the Festival that it’s magical.
Further to that buy-in is that of the community, Kaszas says, which is really what sets the Festival apart. The community has adopted the Festival as its own, welcoming and supporting it - but that’s because the Festival is telling the stories of the community and its people, so it’s really a circular relationship between the Festival and its artists and the community and its residents.
Despite not growing up in a small community, Kaszas says she didn’t feel an aspect of culture shock when she began working at the Festival and later became its artistic director. She said the community adopting her, in a way, was a big part of the circular relationship that she so admires about the Festival and she still has a tremendous spot in her heart for Blyth and the Blyth Festival.
After her first season, she mounted what would become one of the Festival’s greatest successes, penned by two of its incredibly talented founders. Another Season’s Promise, written by Keith Roulston and Anne Chislett, opened the 1986 season, which continued with Drift by Rex Deverell, Gone to Glory by Suzanne Finlay, Lilly, Alta by Kenneth Dybat and Cake-Walk by Colleen Curran.
Another Season’s Promise would return the following season, be produced internationally and spawn a sequel in 2006, Another Season’s Harvest by Roulston and Chislett once again. Notably, for Kaszas, Another Season’s Promise played an integral role in the Festival’s touring productions, which were really taking off at the time. The touring productions served as high-quality advertisements for the Blyth Festival that would show up at your door in towns across southwestern Ontario and beyond. She said they worked wonders in terms of bringing audiences to Blyth.
However, when the Drayton Festival Theatre opened in Grand Bend in the early 1990s, its presence put a bit of a stop on things, as the communities that were being served by the Festival’s touring productions were now being served by the Grand Bend theatre, so those audiences began to dry up. Kaszas did note that the Blyth/Grand Bend baseball rivalry, however, did not dry up, and she remembers Blyth on the winning end of many of their fun inter-industry games.
In fact, she’s sure that it was one of those games that induced labour with one of her two children who were born during her time at the Blyth Festival. She also remembered that there was a British actress in the company for one of the games and, at her time at bat, she struck the ball into the field of play. However, being British and not overly familiar with baseball, her cricket mind clicked on and she ran to the pitcher’s mound.
The Blyth Festival crew busted into uproarious laughter and Kaszas soon felt it was time to head to a local hospital. The Festival staff greeted her appropriately upon her return - celebrating her new baby and welcoming her back to the job.
After five years as the artistic director, growing the audience in ways the founders could only have dreamed about back in those early days, Kaszas felt it was time to move on. Five years was enough, she said.
Amos had grown the Festival to bring in audiences that would have been unimaginable in those first few seasons and, by the time Kaszas was nearing the end of her time with the Festival, nearly 45,000 people were coming to Blyth for the Festival every season - attendance level heights that are the envy of many.
Furthermore, Kaszas arguably managed the most substantial expansion of the Festival and Memorial Hall in its history. Thanks in part to a rare federal and provincial government funding opportunity, the Festival’s old garage was renovated and carpentry, paint, costume and prop shops were all built. The former CIBC bank branch was converted into offices, the box office link (including the Bainton Gallery - the home of the Blyth Festival Art Gallery) was constructed and the June Hill rehearsal room and large loading dock were all constructed. These major improvements created the earliest version of the Memorial Hall we all now know and love.
The cost was approximately $2 million dollars and it was only finally paid off within the last 11 years. However, at that time, the Festival had grown and with it, its budget had grown to more than $1.5 million - again, something that would have been unthinkable in those early seasons of the Festival.
After leaving the Blyth Festival, Kaszas served as the associate artistic director of Canadian Stage in Toronto and as a dramaturge at the Banff Centre for the Arts, all while freelancing within the Canadian theatre world here and there.
In her later years, however, she found a real passion ignited within her when she began to teach on a full-time basis. She taught at both the University of Toronto and Sheridan Music Theatre before heading west to Windsor’s St. Clair College in 2004.
In her time at St. Clair College, she launched both the Music Theatre Performance and Entertainment Technology programs and directed a number of productions. She just recently retired from the position of artistic director of the college’s music theatre programs. In fact, during our interview, Kaszas boasted that Ryan Brink, the Festival’s current hard-working production manager, is one of her graduates.
She continues to be passionate about and invested in the work being done at the Blyth Festival to this day, returning to Huron County when she can to take in productions and that’s because she is in awe of the Festival and its unwavering dedication to its mandate. It is still telling the stories of its region - just as founders James Roy, Anne Chislett and Keith Roulston intended - and that mission has never changed over the course of the last 50 years.
When discussing the rise of Canadian theatre in the 1970s, Kaszas said that each of the theatres doing “radical” work at the time all had their own identity. The Tarragon Theatre, for example, had a truly individual method of telling singular stories, while the Factory Theatre would be better characterized as a gritty, confrontational style of theatre in those early days. Some theatres were producing very well-written, composed plays, while Paul Thompson and Theatre Passe Muraille were staging collective creations that could change from performance to performance and were much more comfortable with improvisation.
In terms of the Blyth Festival, Kaszas says that from the early days of the Festival right up until today, a Blyth Festival show has a specific feel that cannot be replicated. She said you can look at the sweeping scope of work produced at the Blyth Festival over its 50 years, from massive outdoor spectacles like The Outdoor Donnellys to subtle masterpieces like Quiet in the Land and Another Season’s Promise and, despite their drastic differences, know that they are both Blyth Festival productions.
It goes back to that commitment to community and its relationship with the village, she said, and there is always a care and attention, in a community sense, that goes into producing work for the Blyth Festival that is unique.
For our interview, Kaszas carved time out of a busy trip to FaceTime from London, England on a trip to see her daughter, who had just had a baby of her own. Kaszas said she was happy to do it and that she adores the Blyth Festival and the community. That commitment has meant so much over the years and the Festival is lucky to count Kaszas as not just one of the architects of its success along its 50-year journey, but as one of its most dedicated supporters now in 2024.