The best of a good year on city stages

That beloved musical ode to cultural continuity was a fitting serenade for Canada's oldest regional theatre celebrating its 50th anniversary. Since 1958, the company has become a time-honoured custom for generations of Winnipeg theatre-goers seeking the best in classic and contemporary plays.

While the world provided plenty of real-life drama -- the collapse of the global economy, a parliamentary revolt and Barack Obama's historic election victory -- the Winnipeg stage also had its share, led appropriately by MTC.

In a fine Fiddler, former North Ender Jay Brazeau came home to mine all of Tevye's humour and heartbreak, while down the street at the Warehouse, Glengarry Glen Ross was an enthralling revival of an American classic.

Offstage, the organization was busy as well, christening its stages after the names of its founding fathers, installing an impressive new bronze statue outside its front doors, setting a new subscription record and hitting another fringe festival attendance high.

The banner year ended on a high with a shockingly brilliant Medea partnered at the Warehouse with Scorched, Wajdi Mouawad's incisive drama that brought the horrors of a far-away war home here in all its frightening inhumanity.

Prairie Theatre Exchange enjoyed a solid year with a return of farm philosopher Walt Wingfield (Wingfield's Inferno) being a highlight for its patrons. Indicative of its unstinting ambition, Manitoba Theatre for Young People closed 2008 with back-to-back musicals, Rich and A Year With Frog & Toad.

Theatre Projects Manitoba made a laudable foray into a local bar with the politically edgy, one-man show How to Kill Yourself With a Screwdriver and should consider doing it again. Dry Cold is commended for finally getting Urinetown a professional production, and a quality one, at that. Rainbow Stage got as racy as it could with that stage teaser The Full Monty while the revitalized WJT earns kudos for introducing the work of Hannah Moscovitch. Shakespeare in the Ruins is always a good night out but it sure could use a break from Mother Nature.

There was a lot of good work on display on Winnipeg stages in 2008. Here is what was best:

"ö BEST PRODUCTION: Scorched (MTC Warehouse). Nothing else came close to be as urgently contemporary as this immensely rewarding story of civil war, courage and unspeakable abuse in an unnamed Mideast country.

Runners-up: Glengarry Glen Ross (MTC Warehouse) and Medea (MTC).

BEST ACTOR: Harry Nelken (Glengarry Glen Ross). The veteran Winnipeg actor gave the performance of his career as Shelly Levine, a huckster on the cusp of ruin suddenly reborn by the big sale.

Runners-up: Jay Brazeau (Fiddler on the Roof) and Jeremiah Sparks (The Satchmo' Suite).

BEST ACTRESS: Seana McKenna (Medea). Her stunning reprise as the hate-maddened serial killer in the Euripides wronged-woman's revenge play is as good as it gets in Canadian theatre.

Runners-up: Carmen Grant (Syringa Tree) and Monique Marcker (Encore).

BEST DIRECTION: Len Cariou (Glengarry Glen Ross). Manitoba's only Tony Award winner, pushed a cast of overlooked locals into the spotlight and created a homemade winner.

Runners-up: Richard Rose (Scorched) and Ron Jenkins (Rich).

BEST MANITOBA SCRIPT: Shakespeare's Dog (Rick Chafe). Chafe's adaptation of Leon Rooke's comic novel richly imagines how a talking dog offered a helping paw to a hack Elizabethan scribbler named William Shakespeare.

Runners-up: Encore by Marc Prescott (Theatre Projects Manitoba) and All Restaurant Fires are Arson by Bruce McManus (Prairie Theatre Exchange).

BEST DESIGNER: Graeme S. Thomson (Scorched). His visually striking all-sand set that the cast ran around on wonderfully captured the timeless circle of violence that has plagued the Middle East.

Runners-up: Douglas Paraschuk (Fiddler on the Roof) and Brian Perchaluk (Urinetown).

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 4, 2009 D1