The Arts

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

The Buzz

By: Staff Writer

Posted: 03/7/2013 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

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Rick Roberts as Jack Layton

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(MELISSA TAIT / WINNIPEG FREE PRE)

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Main Street Soldier

BRAD OSWALD Ñ TV

Don't know Jack?

There's an added responsibility that falls on any actor tasked with playing an actual person in a fact-based story -- get it right, because offering a less-than-authentic performance will be seen as both unskilled and disrespectful. That pressure has probably never been more pronounced for a Canadian actor than it is for Rick Roberts, who assumes the role of late NDP leader Jack Layton in the shot-in-Winnipeg CBC movie Jack, which airs Sunday, March 10. The equation is simple: the more beloved the real-life figure, the higher the stakes facing the actor.

RANDALL KING Ñ MOVIES

Soldiering on

Before there was a substantial funding mechanism for making movies in Manitoba, filmmaker Leonard Yakir was out there shooting footage and getting films made. Yakir (who also scripted and produced the Dennis Hopper cult film Out of the Blue) lives in New York but returns to Winnipeg on March 8 to present films old and new at Cinematheque, including his 1972 opus Main Street Soldier, a portrait of an alcoholic veteran, as well as his new film The Ruby Concerts, a portrait of revered flutist Carol Wincenc. At 7 p.m.

MORLEY WALKER / BOOKS

Luckily for Leonard Cohen, ticket prices have risen

It's debatable whether or not the world needs another Winston Churchill biography. But a new Simon & Schuster release, Young Titan by U.S.-based Brit Michael Sheldon, focusing on Churchill's early years, might find a few readers here. Chapter 1 opens with an account of his speaking engagement in Winnipeg in January 1901. "Ticket prices started at 50 cents and went all the way up to a dollar and a half."

KEVIN PROKOSH / THEATRE

Top girls

Last chance this week to see some sterling stagework by the 11 local actresses performing at the RMTC Warehouse in The Penelopiad, the theatre version of Margaret Atwood's modern retake on Homer's Odyssey. There's not a weak link in the cast, but individual kudos are earned by Sarah Constible as the shrewd hero Odysseus, who brings down the house when she plays him in disguise as a beggar. Kimberley Rampersad's Helen of Troy lights up the stage, while Jennifer Lyon classes up the evening as the patient Penelope. The run ends March 9.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 7, 2013 ??65534

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