Blyth musical asks timely questions this election year

Performers in The Last Mayor of Rusty River pose around Captain Whiskers on the lectern. Staged during an election year, the Blyth Festival production is inviting audience members to think about local politics – but laugh while they do it.

CONNOR LUCZKA, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

The world of municipal politics may not seem like a natural fit for a musical, though for David Scott and Gil Garratt it fit like a glove.

Scott and Garratt, the artistic director for the Blyth Festival, teamed up to write The Last Mayor of Rusty for this year’s festival, a “thrilling, hilarious, toe-tapping production” staged entirely in the council chambers of the fictional town of Rusty River, a town not dissimilar to many in the region.

“The core of the story is the incumbent mayor, Mayor Larry Fletcher has been the mayor of the town for eight consecutive terms,” Garratt explained. “He's been in public office for 35 years, and essentially the whole town at this point runs according to his every whim. It's his own personal fiefdom at this point. … There's two young millennial councillors, Tim and Tina, and they've been elected to council, and they're ready to make change, to be the change they want to see in the world, and they've arrived wide-eyed and ready to go. And we meet them right at the end of their first term, and they are utterly disillusioned.

“It finally reaches a fever pitch where Tim decides, you know what? If all that politics is ‘you scratch my back, I scratch yours,’ then I have the perfect candidate for mayor, and that is my cat, Captain Whiskers. And it turns out that Captain Whiskers is over the age of 18 and a local resident, and there's nothing on the books that says he has to be a human.”

The Last Mayor of Rusty River is inspired in large part from co-writer Scott’s time in municipal government. Scott is himself the “last mayor of Seaforth,” serving as its mayor for a number of years before it was amalgamated with other regional municipalities to form Huron East in 2001.

“David came to me and what he wanted to do was write a comedy about his time at council and what it what it meant to be sitting in these council meetings and either the utterly consequential or the utterly banal things that would go on at the table, and to capture some of that repartee and fun.”

From the fictional world of Rusty River David created, he and Garratt worked together to structure the story for the stage, bringing in local singer-songwriter John Powers to write original songs for the musical. As Garratt said, the show has some incredible songs with the actors themselves playing the instruments and singing.

While having a lot of fun with the concept and creating a funny, entertaining show, Garratt shared the musical is also dealing with some important issues that won’t be foreign for audience members – from housing and increased homelessness in rural areas to private water-taking and underground aquifers.

“We’ve had an amazing reaction to the show too,” Garratt said. “Audiences have been pouring out; they're on their feet every night. And we also had this amazing experience. Our very first preview, we had actually sold the show entirely, (and it was) an annual event we have here called Municipal Night, where we invite councillors and staff from all the different municipalities in our region. We actually had 27 different municipalities represented in the theatre that night, and we had councillors and mayors and senior staff, junior staff, and they just brought the house down. It was an amazing thing.”

Staged during an election year, Garratt said that was part happy coincidence and careful strategy, as they wanted to have audience members get more engaged with municipal issues, the issues that affect people day in, day out, more than any other issues.

That strategy has worked for them. Garratt shared that show after show, Blyth Memorial Hall fills shoulder to shoulder with audiences laughing their way through council chambers, but also has them leaving wanting to get involved. Audience members have told him the show has pushed them to attend their first council meeting or start real conversations about local issues with their neighbours.

“Even though I know there is this struggle for public engagement in politics, I don't think we're living really in an apathetic age,” Garratt said. “In a way, we've kind of been drawn into this politics as performance, right? Where we are watching it all unfold on our phones, and if there's a way to actually get people, real live people in a real live room, thinking about this, to me, there's something really exciting that's possible.”