The Blyth Festival will launch the 2022 season with and outdoor production of The Drawer Boy on June 22nd.
Artistic Director Gil Garratt says at this point, the entire season will be presented on the new outdoor Harvest Stage, but depending on COVID restrictions, there could be some indoor presentations near the end of the summer.
Garratt says the outdoor Harvest Stage was a huge success last year as it allowed them to bring performers and audiences together and he says it also seemed to trigger new ideas in the writers who have been writing for the Festival for years.
“And then we learned a lot about it too. I think there's a bunch of improvements we're going to try to make this coming year, like we'd like to see the shade that we put over the audience to protect the audience from the sun, we're going to build that up a little bit more so that there's even more shade for people.”
Garratt admits, there is some risk involved in staging an outdoor season and it was something they worried about all of the time.
But he says of one hundred performances, they only had to cancel five.
"We had a pretty good procedure set up, we didn't cancel shows until we were about three hours before. We could still call people while they were at home and not lose out. That's what we tried to do.”
Garratt points out, a lot of restrictions have already been lifted or are scheduled to be lifted in the near future, so they're not ruling out a few indoor productions in late summer or early fall.