MTYP playbill includes Rick Hansen premiere

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MTYP has announced a busy season with productions such as Holy Cow. (SUPPLIED PHOTOS)

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The clown show Aga-Boom. (SUPPLIED PHOTOS)

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Theatre­goers can expect to be busy in the warm weather with the new Summer-Peg Stage initiative. (SUPPLIED PHOTOS)

Next season the Manitoba Theatre for Young People will premiere a new play about wheelchair wonder Rick Hansen before presenting it on the opening day of the Vancouver Paralympics Games next March.

Rick, by leading children's writer Dennis Foon, is one of the highlights of MTYP's 2009-10 season, its 10th at The Forks.

"It's 10 years already," says MTYP artistic director Leslee Silverman. "We are like The Forks as far as theatre for young audiences in Canada. A lot of international companies come and go through here and mix with our kids. The Canada Council called us the soul of children's theatre."

MTYP was commissioned by the Vancouver Organizing Committee to write about the man in motion. Foon has been partnered with Winnipeg filmmaker Deco Dawson who is planning an innovative theatrical production directed by Robb Paterson. Rick opens Feb. 11 before heading to the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver for a run beginning March 12.

The MTYP playlist is book-ended by the clown show Aga-Boom and the stage adaptation of the beloved children's books Good Night Moon and The Runaway Bunny.

"We open with the best of an art form I have ever seen in my life," Silverman says. "These clowns are Russians who live in Las Vegas. They are great."

In between are presentations of The Jungle Book, the Montreal acrobatic act The Perfect Unknowns and puppet musical Holy Cow. The highly regarded teen show Black Violin is performed by two virtuoso Miami-based fiddlers who mix their string play with hip hop. The season wraps with Goodnight Moon from Nova Scotia's Mermaid Theatre.

"It's so familiar that it binds the generations throughout," says Silverman. "I worked to make sure that it was all high-definition theatre, that each production is extraordinarily distinct in its footprint."

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It's been a given for a long time that the regular theatre season runs from October to the May long weekend after which the summer is sprinkled with occasional bursts of activity.

That's not the case anymore and a collective of groups have banded together to make that known to the public. They have created a logo called Summer-Peg Stage, a play of the city's Winterpeg nickname.

"We needed Winnipeggers to know that theatre happens all year around, every day from the week after the (May) long weekend with Dry Cold Productions doing Company to Aug. 28, the last day of Rainbow Stage's Beauty and the Beast," says theatre producer Danny Schur.

Taking part in the initiative are Dry Cold, Shakespeare in the Ruins, Parks Canada, which presents historical dramas at The Forks, St. Boniface's Theatre in the Cemetery, Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, Rainbow Stage and Schur's Strike! productions.

"It is the branding of theatre in Winnipeg as a destination," says Schur. "Our logo is the portal on Destination Winnipeg and Travel Manitoba (websites). "

Summer-Peg Stage will be officially launched shortly.

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The WJT is opening its 22nd season next October with the premiere of Some Things You Keep by Alix Sobler, a Winnipegger transplanted from New York. The WJT-commissioned comedy tells the story of a woman's widower father coming from New York to the Prairies for the first time.

The remaining WJT presentations next season are Betrayal (Jan. 28-Feb. 7, 2010), Harold Pinter's seminal drama about adultery, and David Gow's Cherry Docs (April 29-May 9), which puts hate on trial when a Jewish lawyer is appointed to defend a neo-Nazi skinhead accused of a racially motivated murder. Ron Lea, who played Willy Loman in WJT's Death of a Salesman last January, returns as the husband in Betrayal.

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Alberta Theatre Projects has announced that it will open its 2009-10 season next Sept. 22 with Rick Chafe's Shakespeare's Dog.

The Manitoba Theatre Centre premiered Chafe's adaptation of Leon Rooke's novel last season as part of a co-production with the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. The quirky comedy makes the case that's the Bard's dog Hooker had a paw in Shakespeare becoming the English-speaking world's greatest playwright.

"This gives me the next level of both approval and exposure," says Chafe, who is currently working on a Prairie Theatre Exchange commission called The Secret Mask.

"It is easier to get a first production in Canada than a second production strangely enough. Theatres will commit to being the originating theatre and they get kudos and grants for it but there is no support for a second production of anything."

Another company has agreed to present Shakespeare's Dog in 2010-11.

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 30, 2009 D3