The play's the thing, but, c'mon... four of 'em?

Oct. 14 is a good day to open a theatre season.

Don't take my word for it. Just ask the artistic directors of the four largest stage companies in the city. Manitoba Theatre Centre, Manitoba Theatre for Young People, Prairie Theatre Exchange and Winnipeg Jewish Theatre have all circled that date to kick off their 2010-11 campaign next week.

Instead of the usual staggered start in which each troupe stakes out a Thursday when it can bask alone in the theatrical spotlight with a carefully chosen play sure to appeal to its returning patrons, the foursome are all piling on.

It's not like the schedule is so crowded this month. In fact, every other Thursday in October is opening-free.

"It's crazy," says University of Manitoba theatre professor Chris Johnson about the season start bottleneck. "I don't think it's a good idea myself. I think you reduce the impact of each of the openings."

"It's a really crushing way to start the season, says Ardith Boxall, artistic director of Theatre Projects Manitoba who launches with Almighty Voice and His Wife Nov. 4 at the same time as the Warehouse production of Jake's Gift.

At the very least it looks dumb. And you have to wonder if our artistic leaders even talk to each other and, more importantly, listen. Would one of them lose face if their theatre opted to switch dates?

Conflicts are nothing new in Winnipeg theatre but this is the first time so many theatres raise the curtain on their seasons on the same day. Most of the overlaps are usually between MTC, which presents 10 plays on the mainstage and the Warehouse venues, while PTE has six stage offerings. But the number of collisions seems to be growing.

All three WJT productions this season open simultaneously with PTE ones, a fact WJT executive producer Michael Nathanson was unhappy to learn yesterday.

'Frustrating'

"On some level that's extremely frustrating because I've given them my dates well in advance," he says. "I don't know why they would do that. I would like to think they didn't do it on purpose.

"I send emails to everybody. I say, 'I don't want to open against anybody, these are our dates.' I give out my dates a year-and-a-half prior because the Berney Theatre is not ours so we don't have the option of going, 'We'll just open here.'"

Manitoba Theatre Centre's Steven Schipper says his company announces its season first so everyone else knows its dates and when it would launch its mainstage lineup with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. PTE artistic director Bob Metcalfe says his schedule with The Savannah Disputation leading off works best for his organization.

The concurrent openings will force patrons as well as reviewers to choose one theatre over the other because no one can be at all the openings. Each organization can count on their loyal subscribers but walk-up sales have to be impacted. Not that many theatre-lovers can afford to fork out money for so many tickets in a week that starts with a one-off performance at the Centennial Concert Hall of Fiddler on the Roof by an American touring company. It's doubtful the theatre-going community is large enough to fill all the theatres.

"I think the average theatregoer will choose to go to two," says Johnson.

Nathanson is hoping WJT's Lenin's Embalmers is one of them.

"I think our audience is very different from all the others," says Nathanson. "With Lenin's Embalmers, we have a local boy, (playwright) Vern Thiessen, and we are marketing aggressively to the Mennonite community. We could make it Mennonite night. I think we have a bit of an event happening."

MTYP's Leslee Silverman says she spent some time in Vancouver last year and noticed that the theatres there weren't stepping on each other's toes schedule-wise. It's true that Vancouver's two largest theatres, the Playhouse and Arts Club, don't conflict once during this season.

"They got it worked out, not like here," says Silverman. "This is not a good thing. It's insane."

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 9, 2010 C3